For Judith Regan, a date with Sumner Redstone ‘Much better than Rupert Murdoch’

Joe Pompeo
·Media Reporter

It was supposed to be a chat about Judith Regan's upcoming appearance on "The Millionaire Matchmaker." It turned into a News Corp. thrashing.

Regan, a former publishing doyenne turned Sirius radio host, was fired in 2006 from News Corp. subsidiary HarperCollins amid the controversy surrounding O.J. Simpson's "If I Did It." She sat down with Daily Beast scribe Lloyd Grove in advance of her Dec. 14 appearance on Patti Stinger's matchmaking Bravo reality show, which is based in New York this season.

Try as he did to "discourage" a "lengthy and detailed indictment" of News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch's "alleged treachery against her," Grove could not steer Regan clear of an anti-News Corp. tirade.

"I was very wronged by News Corp., and they had to retract all the [expletive] they said and they had to eat it, and they had to pay me," she said. "You have to give me credit: I did win in the end."

Then came the attack on News Corp goldmines Glenn Beck and Fox News, which are guilty of "repulsive anti-Semitism," Regan told Grove: "They specialize in it—look what they've done to George Soros. It's unbelievable ... If you study the Fox News method of operation, there's all kinds of historic anti-Semitic views and the stuff with Glenn Beck is textbook."

As for Regan's potential paramours, Stanger apparently had another media mogul in mind: the reporter-bribing, girl-group-smitten 87-year-old chairman of Viacom and CBS, Sumner Redstone.

"This is the perfect man for me, according to Patti Stanger," Regan quipped. "And then she says to me, 'Much better than Rupert Murdoch!'"

(AP/Richard Drew)