Back in 2007, former Harper Collins editor Judith Regan filed $100 million lawsuit against Harper Collins and its parent company, News Corp, for defamation. She accused a Fox News executive of telling her to lie to federal investigators while they investigated former Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik (who is now in prison) because news of her affair with Kerik would hurt Rudy Giuliani's presidential chances. And now it seems like the executive she was referring to was Fox News chairman Roger Ailes.
The NY Times reports, "The documents say that Ms. Regan taped the telephone call from Mr. Ailes in which Mr. Ailes discusses her relationship with Mr. Kerik... If it were to become public, the tape could be highly embarrassing to Mr. Ailes, a onetime adviser to Richard Nixon whom critics deride as a partisan who engineers Fox News coverage to advance Republicans and damage Democrats, something Fox has long denied. Mr. Ailes also had close ties with Mr. Giuliani, whom he advised in his first mayoral race. Mr. Giuliani officiated at Mr. Ailes’s wedding and intervened on his behalf when the Fox News Channel was blocked from securing a cable station in the city."
Regan, who felt victimized by News Corp when she was fired because the company terminated her for allegedly using an anti-Semitic remark, eventually settled with News Corp for over $10 million. A News Corp spokesman told the Times, "Mr. Ailes did not intend to influence [Regan] with respect to a government investigation. The matter is closed." But it's so interesting: One of Regan's lawyers "wrote in an affidavit that Ms. Regan told him that Mr. Ailes sought to brand her as promiscuous and crazy. 'Regan believed that Ailes and News Corp. subsidiary Fox News had an interest in protecting Giuliani’s bid for the U.S. presidency,' he wrote."
