The Regan Report: Goldmans suing, publishing reactions

It’s not just Judith Regan threatening a lawsuit (and if she does, the likelihood of HarperCollins countersuing seems pretty good, no?) but lawyers tell CBS News the Goldman family will file a lawsuit against OJ Simpson and Lorraine Brook Associates in Los Angeles Tuesday, claiming Simpson still got paid, seeking to undo all the transactions related to the deal and, where appropriate, recover money for the Goldman family. “He was given a book advance, as many authors are given when they write books,” Kim Goldman told CBS’s Hattie Kauffman. “He was forwarded, I believe it was somewhere in the $800,000 range.”

Moving back to Regan’s firing, PW’s Sara Nelson had choice words not about the turn of events, but the tendency towards schadenfreude. “…the common wisdom is that Regan simply had to go, that she had become a public embarrassment to her company and to all of publishing,” said Nelson. “While that’s certainly true, I’m deeply skeptical about the suggestion that firing Regan means the book business has, at long last, re-found its soul. It’s a business, after all, and if publishing to the lowest common denominator is what makes companies profitable, then that’s the kind of publishing we’re going to continue, at least sometimes, to do.” While many comments accompanying the PW piece praise Nelson, others say she was “too sympathetic” and that when push comes to shove, HarperCollins “waited too long to get rid of Regan.”

The Harvard Crimson’s Vanessa Dube takes the schadenfreude thing even further – suggesting that Regan should not have been maligned for wanting to publish Simpson’s book. “For Judith Regan to assume any blame for the situation only serves to undermine her original journalistic duty: to look under the rock and to see what is growing there. Just because her audience doesn’t like what she found doesn’t mean she should apologize.”

But SCB Special Sales director Patrick Hughes had his own, more unusual take, which first went around his offices and now he’s agreed to share with us. Why unusual? It’s a parody of another speech, one you might recognize:

I come not to praise Judith Regan, but to bury her.
The evil things that publishers do live on after them
The good things like OJ’s story are often buried after their bones
Let it be this way with Judith. The noble Harper Collins
has told you that Judith was completely amoral.
If that were true, it was a terrible fault.
And Judith Regan paid for it dearly.
Here, with the permission of Harper Collins and the rest of News Corp
(For HarperCollins is an honorable house;
So they all, are honorable News Corp men)
I come to speak at Judith’s funeral
She has brought so many authors to Harper Collins,
Whose cheap and tawdry tales filled Murdoch’s treasuries.
Did this seem ambitious to Judith?
Whenever a celebrity cried, Judith has wept.
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff
But HarperCollins says she was ambitious;
And Murdoch is an honorable man.
You all saw that on Larry King
I offered her her own talk show three times. Was this ambition?
Which she refused three times.
But Harper Collins says she was ambitious.
And surely Murdoch is an honorable man.
I am speaking not to disprove what Murdoch said,
But I am here to say what I do know.
You all loved her trashy reads once, for good reasons.
What reasons keep you mourning for her, then?
O judgement, you have run away to YouTube and Defamer. Bear with me,
My heart is in the coffin there with Judith.
And I must praise until she finds another publisher.

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