Regan says she was told to lie to protect Giuliani

NEW YORK — Former publisher Judith Regan filed a $100-million defamation lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and other defendants Tuesday, alleging she was asked by company officials to lie to federal investigators in order to protect Rudolph W. Giuliani's presidential bid. She also charged that company officials had orchestrated a "smear campaign" to discredit her after her promotion of a controversial memoir by O.J. Simpson.

The lawsuit, filed in New York Supreme Court, comes roughly a year after the Simpson controversy engulfed Regan, an outspoken maverick in the book world. She was fired in December by HarperCollins -- which is owned by News Corp. -- after she was accused of making anti-Semitic comments, a charge she has angrily denied. Although Regan has retreated from the headlines since then, her lawsuit seems certain to reignite her bitter dispute with her former bosses as well as to potentially affect the presidential campaign.

Amid a flurry of allegations, the one most likely to cause a stir is Regan's charge that News Corp.'s political agenda was to protect the campaign of former New York Mayor Giuliani, especially when it came to the controversies over former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, whom Giuliani had recommended for the post of Homeland Security secretary. Regan said she confided to company executives as early as 2001 that she had been having an affair with Kerik, whose memoir, "The Lost Son," she published shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.

After President Bush nominated Kerik for Homeland Security secretary in 2004, Regan alleges in her suit, one executive "advised Regan to lie to, and to withhold information from, investigators concerning Kerik."

The company then launched a campaign to discredit her, because it feared that she might disclose information that would be politically hurtful to Giuliani, the suit said. Kerik subsequently withdrew his name from consideration amid a cloud of legal questions over his past behavior and fitness for office; he was indicted last week on federal charges, including tax fraud.

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