The Times Gets Down and Dirty

The Times pulls off a media coup and brings back the story of "the fallen media queen" to take a swipe at Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News. The detailed story delves into the complicated legal battle between Judith Regan and Fox, which fired her from her glamorous spot at HarperCollins five years ago.

Fox wanted to protect Bernie Kerik's nomination as homeland security chief, a close friend of Rudy Giuliani, who wanted to be president. Regan says a Fox executive called her to ask her to forget Kerik when the FBI came around to do its background check. Regan and Kerik had a fling sometime before. This is only the surface. I don't have the space to go into more detail. I always check Gawker on smutty news stories because it always gets to the heart of the matter. In this case, Gawker sent me to Vanity Fair, which did a very long piece in 2005, about Regan, a phosphorous-burning publisher of books like a memoir by a Ballet dancer who liked anal sex, or a guide to sex for men by the porn star Jenna Jameson.

So you get the idea. It's hot stuff for the Times.

Anyway, since Fox fired her, there's been a labyrinth of lawsuits in the tens of millions of dollars. Many thousands of words have been written about this in the Times and elsewhere in the last five years, while Regan has drifted down to daytime TV appearances. The one missing gold nugget in the story was the name of the Fox executive who called her. Regan never said.

With various settlements, the court files were supposed to be sealed but somehow one was not sealed, and a Times metro desk reporter who recently was covering the snow storm, got wind of it. In that file, the Times found Ailes name. Voila!

The bottom line: who told the Times? Who gets something out of this one? That's the story. And the Times is such a tease, at least for those of us with noses pressed up against the window.

Records Say Fox News Chief Told Employee to Lie

---