Report: Court Filing Reveals That Firing Judith Regan Cost News Corp. $10.75 Million

Here's a trifle for the end of your day: Back in November 2007, Judith Regan hired Brian Kerr of Manhattan law firm Dreier LLP to file a $100 million defamation suit on her behalf against HarperCollins, its C.E.O. Jane Friedman, and its parent company News Corporation. At some point between then and the following January, when the former publisher settled with News Corp. for an undisclosed sum that allowed both parties to walk away from the fiasco without admitting any guilt, Ms. Regan secretly fired Mr. Kerr and went back to her old lawyer from Los Angeles, Bertram Fields.

It was Mr. Fields who brought Ms. Regan's case against News Corp. home, so to speak, but a few months later the Dreier people filed a suit of their own alleging that Ms. Regan had cheated them out of $40,000 worth of legal fees and denied them their share of the News Corp. settlement.

Then yesterday, according to Bloomberg News, Dreier submitted some additional court filings revealing that the mystery figure News Corp. paid Ms. Regan in exchange for retracting her claws and silencing her cries was a stunning $10.75 million dollars.

Related: Earlier this fall someone wrote on Ms. Regan's Facebook wall congratulating her vaguely on a new "post." Ms. Regan responded with something to the effect of "who told you?" but when Media Mob called to ask her what the new job was, she wouldn't say.