Judith Regan

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Judith Regan

Judith Regan (born 1953 in Massachusetts) is an American book publisher.

1 Education and career
2 Family and personal relationships
3 Personality
4 Simpson book
5 Mickey Mantle Book
6 References
7 External links
8 See also

[edit] Education and career

Regan grew up on Long Island, and graduated from Bay Shore High School in 1971.^[1] She then attended Vassar College, receiving her A.B. degree in 1975.

In 1978, while working as a secretary at Harvard, Regan answered a newspaper ad for a reporter for The National Enquirer. She got the job.

In the early 1980s, Regan relocated to New York City. In 1987 she approached Simon & Schuster with an idea for a book, a study of the average American family, with Ozzie and Harriet as its centerpiece. The editor at Pocket Books didn't want the book, but hired Regan to work for the company as a consultant. She soon had a string of successes: Drew Barrymore's Little Girl Lost, Kathie Lee Gifford's I Can't Believe I Said That!, and celebrity autobiographies such as those of Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern.

In 1994 News Corporation CEO Rupert Murdoch gave Regan her own subdivision at HarperCollins called ReganBooks. She later had a show on News Corp's Fox News Channel called Judith Regan Tonight, which is no longer on the air.

In 2006, Regan intended to publish O.J. Simpson's book, If I Did It, which caused widespread controversy. She issued an eight-page defense of the deal, entitled Why I Did It, in which she claimed to be a battered wife and claimed that she felt the "spirit" of O.J. Simpson's vicitims in the room with her as she spoke to Simpson.^[2] On November 20, 2006, News Corporation announced that it was canceling the publication of the book, along with an interview with Simpson that was to air on the FOX Network. ^[3]

[edit] Family and personal relationships

After Regan started working at The National Enquirer, and while still living in Boston, she met David Buckley (born 1946), a psychiatrist. He and Regan had a son, Patrick, in 1981. According to Regan, she divorced Buckley in response to his physical abuse.^[4]^[5] Buckley was convicted of drug trafficking in 1985 and sent to prison for five years. ^[6]

Around 1990, Regan married Robert Kleinschmidt and they had a child, Lara Kleinschmidt, in 1991. The couple separated in 1992. After three trials, the involvement of at least six lawyers, and more than a million dollars in legal fees, their divorce was finalized around 2000.

Beginning in 2000 or 2001, Regan began a year-long affair with married New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik. The affair surfaced during the aftermath of Kerik's (failed) nomination to become the head of the Department of Homeland Security in December 2004.^[7] Mr. Kerik, married at the time, was rumored to have daytime trysts with Ms. Regan at an apartment overlooking Ground Zero, an apartment reserved for tired Ground Zero workers. ^[8]

[edit] Personality

Michael Wolff wrote in the April 5, 1999 edition of New York magazine:

Twenty-five years ago, at Vassar, where we met, she was a pretty, plumpish hippie girl, with a soft-focus interest in music, painting, creative writing. Her focus was sharpened by the fact that her family, from Bayshore, wasn't rich, and she resented those whose families were. She took up with a boy whose parents were very wealthy and after college stayed with him in his parents' apartment in the San Remo on Central Park West -- speaking volubly and bitterly about their wealth and pretensions. She and the boy moved to San Francisco, then to Boston, where she became a secretary at Harvard.

According to The Daily Telegraph in London, she is "the enfant terrible of American publishing", with some critics calling her the "angriest woman in the media"".^[9] Vanity Fair magazine called her a "foul-mouthed tyrant". A former friend described her as "the highest functioning deranged person I've ever known".^[9]

[edit] Simpson book

According to an MSNBC article on her decision to publish If I Did It:

“She did it to help victims of violence. As a young woman, she wrote, she was abused by a boyfriend and believes Simpson's confession to the murders—even hypothetically—will heal the wounds of victims everywhere. (The former boyfriend denied the abuse allegations.) "I made the decision to publish this book, and to sit face to face with the killer," Regan said, "because I wanted him, and the men who broke my heart and your hearts, to tell the truth, to confess their sins, to do penance and to amend their lives. Amen."^[10]”

After a firestorm of criticism, News. Corp. canceled publication of the O.J. Simpson book.^[11] After the public fallout Newsweek reported, "Regan's meddlesome-free days are almost certainly over" and Murdoch will be "clamping" down on control.^[11]

[edit] Mickey Mantle Book

On December 14, 2006, the New York Daily News reported that ReganBooks would publish a "fictional biography" of New York Yankees legend Mickey Mantle titled 7: The Mickey Mantle Novel written by sportswriter Peter Golenbeck, who had previously written The Bronx Zoo with Yankees relief pitcher Sparky Lyle.

The book is has sparked much controversy resulting from the fact that it is not a true biography, but rather, by Golenbeck's own admission, events that are not verifiable (such as Mantle having sex with Marilyn Monroe, who at the time was married to retired Yankee legend Joe Dimaggio) and imaginary conversations that Golenbeck imagines having with the late Yankees slugger. (This is the same technique used by Edmund Morris when he wrote Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, a book about former United States President Ronald Reagan.)

The Mantle family has strongly objected to the book, while Mantle's Yankee teammate Whitey Ford dismisses the notion that Mantle had sex with Marilyn Monroe as "the stupidest thing he ever heard."

However, maverick Yankee pitcher and Ball Four author Jim Bouton told Golenbeck "that he had Mickey's voice down pretty well." And while not defending the book outright, Syracuse University journalism professor and pop culture expert Bob Thompson, said what Golenbeck has done "has a long literary tradition.^[12]