Posted on 02/27/2004 11:57:01 AM PST by paltz
This week the small staff at ReganBooks - the highly profitable publishing imprint at Rupert Murdoch's HarperCollins - received good news and bad news. The good news is that Sean Hannity's "Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism and Liberalism," a ReganBooks title, has just hit No. 1 on the New York Times Bestseller list. The bad news is that four more employees of the notoriously sharp-tongued Judith Regan have just left the imprint.
The departure of longtime marketing director Carl Raymond and his assistant (whom Regan, in a brief phone interview, referred to as "a temp"), leaves ReganBooks without a marketing department. Also gone are a junior editor and Regan's personal assistant. "All I will say about that," Regan told me, "is that Carl Raymond is the only one who resigned. He is an enormously talented marketing director. He was with me for over five years, and he worked like a dog." Raymond didn't return my call. He and the others are the latest departures in what I'm told has been a "mass exodus" from Regan's fiefdom in the past two years - nearly a dozen employees in all. Regan is unapologetic. "You know what? To be very successful, there's a lot of very hard work, and a lot of insanity, which goes with the territory," she told me. "I run a tight ship, work with very creative and hardworking people, who are really smart and really aggressive. We also produce at a very high level. Some people can't do that. Some people don't have the work ethic, the creativity, the drive, the ambition, the desire - and that's why they don't make it." But a former ReganBooks staffer said: "She is the boss from hell," and half a dozen ex-employees complained to me about Regan's allegedly abusive behavior. Fearing reprisals from their former boss, none of these ex-staffers would allow me to identify them. Their testimony, however, is remarkably consistent.
According to multiple sources, the 50-year-old mother of two is a brilliant publisher with an uncanny feel for the marketplace. She can also be enormously charming. But she is also, I've been told, a bully who regularly addresses underlings as "f-- retards" and "f-- idiots," and phones them after midnight at home to berate them in profanity-laced tirades. I'm told that one Regan employee developed a stress-induced rash, and another suffered stomach trouble under her steady fire. I hear that HarperCollins compensated several departing employees who signed confidentiality agreements on their way out the door. When Regan left Simon & Schuster to establish her imprint at HarperCollins in 1995, she reported directly to Chairman Murdoch of News Corp., which owns the publishing house, as well as Fox News and the New York Post. But now she answers to HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman (who didn't return repeated phone calls about Regan). The allegedly toxic atmosphere at ReganBooks is an open secret at HarperCollins, and in the past six months, Friedman installed exec Carie Freimuth (who also didn't return my phone calls) to, as one person told me, "monitor the insanity."
Regan didn't personally respond to a detailed E-mail enumerating the complaints, but her lawyer called them "outrageous" and "patently false." Harper Collins Vice President Lisa Herling E-mailed: "Judith Regan is an extraordinarily creative and talented publisher. Her abundant talents have been demonstrated again and again by the critical and commercial success of books published under the ReganBooks imprint. "In your E-mail, you ask Ms. Regan to comment upon certain allegations from unnamed sources. It is HarperCollins' policy never to comment on internal personnel matters, nor dignify gossip by responding to it."
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