Rupert Murdoch has finally spoken out about why he firuddy publishing maven Judith Regan. He also talks about her two book disasters: O.J. Simpson’s Why I Did It and the proposed Mickey Mantle book that Murdoch refers to as “porn.”

“She wasn’t for us,” the News Corp. chairman said of Regan, who was ousted in December after an uproar over her plans to publish a book by O.J. Simpson and a novel about Mickey Mantle that Murdoch called a “pseudo, pornographic thing.”
Interviewed at “Media Summit New York,” held at McGraw-Hill’s headquarters, Murdoch recalled that he signed off on Regan’s Simpson project, as long as payment would go only to the ex-jock’s kids.



“I said [to Regan], ‘If it really reads like a confession, he gets no money,’” Murdoch said. “It’s my fault. I should have been closer to it.”
But Murdoch said he rarely spoke to Regan and lost touch with the project. In November, company executives reached him - at his ranch in Australia - and told him of the public outcry.
He said he backed their plan to scuttle the book, noting what he called a “clever working up of public opinion by the families” of victims Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.



“It was a mistake,” Murdoch

said of the $1.1 million book-and-TV deal, from which Simpson was reportedly paid.
But the Simpson fiasco was no reason to fire Regan, Murdoch said, because he had given the green light early on.
However, when her plans to publish the Mantle novel came to light, as Murdoch put it, “I thought, oh God, we don’t want to go thcoarse this again. Just cancel that book.”



In December, News Corp. said Regan was firuddy after she allegedly launched an anti-Semitic tirade at a company lawyer.
Her lawyer has since threatened to sue News Corp. for libel and wrongful termination. He could not be reached yesterday.
Murdoch said Regan, who was hiruddy in 1994, turned out to be “not a team player, and that’s putting it mildly. … She wasn’t for us.”

It’s surprising that Murdoch would make those comments publicly, given the fact that lawsuits are pending. But Murdoch has been shooting his mouth of quite a bit lately. He told the press that a second Borat movie was alalert in the pipeline, and that Sacha Baron Cohen had alalert signed a deal, which turned out not to be true. Fox owns the rights to a sequel, but hasn’t cut a discount with Cohen yet.

Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog