Ailes triangulated. Around this time, he ran into Maryland congressman Elijah Cummings, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, and suggested Fox could co-host a televised debate with the group in Detroit. It was a difficult sell, because many caucus members saw Fox as hostile to African Americans. Ailes met privately with former Michigan congresswoman Carolyn Kilpatrick. When she questioned him about his interest in civil rights, Ailes whipped out a photo of himself with Malcolm X on the set of The Mike Douglas Show. Kilpatrick was swayed. On March 29, Fox announced that the CBC would host a pair of debates on Fox News, the first taking place in Detroit in September. But the maneuver failed. One week later, the Democratic National Committee announced that Fox News would be shut out from hosting the six official DNC primary debates. The next day, John Edwards pulled out of the Detroit debate, and the following Monday, Clinton and Obama announced that they were aligning with Edwards on the Fox boycott. “CNN seemed like a more appropriate venue,” Obama spokesman Bill Burton told the press.
The problem with the 2008 Republican primaries from an entertainment standpoint was that the talent was weak. Around the second floor, Ailes evinced little enthusiasm for his party’s 2008 candidates, who included former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, John McCain, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, and Kansas senator Sam Brownback. Ailes called them the “seven dwarves.” He made an exception for an old friend: Rudy Giuliani. In April, Giuliani was a guest at News Corp’s table at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. What’s more, Fox gave the New York mayor an invaluable national platform to propel his candidacy. A study found that in the first six months of 2007, Fox gave Giuliani more interview time than any other candidate.
Which is why the news that broke on Tuesday afternoon, November 13, two weeks before the crucial GOP debate in St. Petersburg, Florida, threatened to derail Giuliani’s campaign. Judith Regan, the flamboyantly abrasive HarperCollins book publisher, filed a $100 million defamation suit against News Corp. It was the latest chapter in a tabloid circus that followed Regan’s abrupt firing the previous December, and would soon entangle Ailes and Giuliani in a web of competing agendas.
At the heart of it was television. Books had fueled Judith Regan’s rise. A former National Enquirer reporter, she possessed a sixth tabloid sense, which she tapped to publish a string of salacious bestsellers—including Howard Stern’s Private Parts and Jenna Jameson’s How to Make Love like a Porn Star. But her desire was to be bigger, more famous, than her celebrity authors. In 2006, Regan got Murdoch’s permission to pay O. J. Simpson $880,000 for the rights to publish If I Did It, Simpson’s hypothetical “confession.” The book was a centerpiece of Regan’s plan to reinvent herself as a prime-time personality. (In 2002, when Ailes canceled her weekly Fox News show, Regan told the press it had been her decision.) To roll out Simpson’s book, Regan would interview Simpson for a prime-time special to air on Fox TV. Regan had even relocated to Los Angeles in a quest to become a “multi-platform” media star—an Oprah for the Sex and the City Age.
The whole thing blew back massively at Regan and News Corp on November 14, 2006, when details of the Simpson book and television special first appeared in the press. As pundits moralized about Regan’s morally suspect pursuit of profit, the flurry of headlines metastasized into a full-fledged corporate crisis. After days of withering criticism, News Corp pulled the plug. Although Murdoch and HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman had supported the project, Regan took the brunt of the blame for the scandal. By this point, Regan had few allies left inside News Corp. In a company full of massive egos, she stood apart. Stories of her office rage and the way she tormented underlings were legend. “Judith would call them ‘cunts’ who only had a job because of her hard work,” one former employee said. Things got so out of control that, in 2003, News Corp opened an HR investigation into her behavior. Jane Friedman, who had clashed with Regan for years, was running out of patience.
In December 2006, Friedman fired Regan. She got the news in Los Angeles when her work computer suddenly was shut off. The two-sentence press release went out on December 15. Accounts soon leaked to reporters that Regan had been dismissed after she made an anti-Semitic slur to Mark Jackson, a HarperCollins lawyer. During a heated phone conversation, Regan allegedly told Jackson, who was Jewish, that a “Jewish cabal” was out to get her. “Of all people, the Jews should know about ganging up, finding common enemies and telling the big lie,” Regan allegedly said. Her lawyer, Bert Fields, strenuously denied the account, attributing the termination to Regan’s long-running feud with Friedman. As crass as she sometimes was, Regan vehemently objected to being branded an anti-Semite. Striking back, she had leverage.
Like Ailes, Regan was a brilliant storyteller and mythmaker. Her November 2007 lawsuit was no exception. The complaint, filed in the New York State Supreme Court, read like a pitch for a pulp corporate whodunit she might have published. “This action arises from a deliberate smear campaign orchestrated by one of the world’s largest media conglomerates for the sole purpose of destroying one woman’s credibility and reputation,” it began. “This smear campaign was necessary to advance News Corp’s political agenda, which has long centered on protecting Rudy Giuliani’s presidential ambitions.” Regan’s narrative sizzled with sex, power, and money. The media seized on an alluring nugget about Regan’s affair with Giuliani’s disgraced former police commissioner Bernard Kerik, who was indicted the previous week on multiple federal corruption charges. Her lawsuit alleged that a “senior executive at News Corp told Regan that he believed she had information about Kerik that, if disclosed, would harm Giuliani’s presidential campaign. This executive told Regan to lie to, and withhold information from, investigators concerning Kerik.” Regan would later allege that the unnamed executive was Roger Ailes.
The next week, the strength of Regan’s hand became immediately apparent. Susan Estrich, a Fox News contributor and Regan friend, was at Thanksgiving dinner at a friend’s home in Malibu when she got a tip that, like Andrea Mackris, Regan possessed a trump card. Regan claimed to have secretly captured Ailes on tape allegedly advising her to lie to the Feds. Estrich got a copy of Regan’s complaint and called her friend Joel Kaufman, who had been Regan’s producer at Fox. “We have to help Roger,” she said. “We’ve got to strategize how we deal with this.”
Ailes passed Estrich off to his personal lawyer, Peter Johnson Sr., a former street cop turned hard-nosed Manhattan litigator who had taken part in the battle at Iwo Jima in World War II. A meeting with Murdoch and News Corp’s senior legal team was convened. In Murdoch’s cold calculus, Ailes was the asset that needed to be protected. Murdoch had come to blame Jane Friedman for impatiently firing Regan, which had set off the unfortunate chain of events. “He’s the talent. News Corp wants to make sure we helped him as much as we could in a way that was legal,” an executive involved in the talks said.
The view inside News Corp was that Regan was capable of anything. Estrich, who was dispatched to act as a backchannel intermediary between Ailes and Regan, advised her against releasing the tape. “Susan acted as Judith’s shrink,” one executive said, “making sure she did not self-destruct.” Complicating matters, Regan’s camp refused to allow Murdoch and his lieutenants to listen to her alleged tape of Ailes. Without knowing what was precisely said, News Corp’s lawyers were flying blind. In meetings, Ailes denied he advised Regan to obstruct justice. “It’s embarrassing,” he told his lawyers, referring to his conversation with Regan. “I use salty language.” Lon Jacobs, who was then News Corp’s general counsel, pressed Johnson for hard facts. “I need to know what News Corp’s exposure is,” he said. Johnson backed his client up. He assured Jacobs that Ailes had said nothing illegal on the tape. Even if Regan relented, Jacobs did not want to hear the recording. News Corp’s outside counsel advised him not to listen to it, in case Ailes had made incriminating remarks.