Judith Regan Was a Very Expensive Mistake

Remember Judith Regan? She was famous for publishing anything at her Newscorp/HarperCollins imprint, Regan books—as long as it was trashy, salacious, and celeb-autobiography oriented, like O.J. Simpson's If I Did It (which Newscorp killed.) She was like the National Enquirer of book publishers. In 2006, she was fired for saying something about the Jews, and she filed a $100 million lawsuit. It was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount, but, as the Observer brought to our attention, we now know the figure that NewsCorp paid out to shut her up—$10.75 mil. Damn—that's a lot of lawyering. Update: When called for comment by our intern James Frey, Jonathan Burnham, publisher of HarperCollins, said "no comment."