Regan: I was asked to protect Giuliani

NEW YORK — Former publisher Judith Regan filed a $100 million defamation lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch's media conglomerate News Corp. and other defendants, alleging she was asked by company officials to lie to federal investigators to protect the presidential bid of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

She also charged that company officials orchestrated a "smear campaign" to discredit her, after her promotion of a memoir by O.J. Simpson.

Giuliani dismissed questions Wednesday about the allegations made by Regan, a former lover of Bernard Kerik, Giuliani's former police commissioner.

Asked for his response to the lawsuit, the Republican laughed. "I don't respond to the story at all. I don't know anything about it. And it sounds to me like a kind of gossip-column story more than a real story," Giuliani said while campaigning in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

Asked if he was aware of Kerik and Regan's relationship, he said: "I think that's a gossip-column story, and the last thing in the world you want to do when you're running for president is respond to gossip-column type stories."

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in New York, comes roughly a year after the Simpson controversy. Regan was fired in December by HarperCollins — owned by News Corp. — after allegedly making anti-Semitic comments, a charge she has denied.

Amid the lawsuit's many allegations, the one causing the biggest stir Wednesday was Regan's charge that News Corp.'s political agenda was to protect Giuliani's campaign, especially when it came to the controversies surfacing over Kerik, whom Giuliani had promoted for the post of Homeland Security secretary.

Regan said she confided to company executives as early as 2001 that she had an affair with Kerik, whose memoir "The Lost Son" she published soon after the Sept. 11 attacks.

After Kerik was nominated by President Bush to be Homeland Security secretary, Regan alleges in her suit that one News Corp. executive "advised Regan to lie to, and to withhold information from, investigators concerning Kerik," and that the company launched a campaign to discredit her, fearing she might disclose information that would be hurtful to Giuliani.

News Corp. — which also owns Fox Broadcasting, the Fox News Channel and the New York Post, and is poised to take control of Dow Jones, owner of The Wall Street Journal — calls the claims preposterous.

Kerik subsequently withdrew his name from consideration amid a cloud of legal questions over his past behavior and fitness for office. He pleaded not guilty last week to a 16-count federal indictment charging him with conspiracy, corruption and tax evasion.

In the lawsuit, Regan, 54, also revisits the charge that got her fired: that she had used an anti-Semitic slur in a conversation with a company executive, claiming a "Jewish cabal" had been lining up against her within the corporation.

"This lawsuit repeats what we had said earlier, that Judith was fired without cause, on trumped-up grounds," said Los Angeles attorney Bert Fields, who represents Regan.

The notion that Regan had made any kind of anti-Semitic comment "is totally false."

In addition to News Corp., the lawsuit names HarperCollins, and Jane Friedman, the publisher's chief executive.