hoping for a literary lynching?

The NYT’s Sharon Waxman is panting at the possibility that Judith Regan’s lawsuit of NewsCorp for her “wrongful termination” from HarperCollins might expose the skeletons in the closet of the New York publishing world:

At least that’s what Regan’s lawyer seems to be threatening, if I read Waxman correctly:

Ms. Regan, whose lively personal life is already well-worn fodder for tabloid gossip, will find lawyers poring over every off-color remark she may have made, Mr. O’Donnell said. Former colleagues have already emerged to confirm that she was reprimanded in the past for making an anti-Semitic remark at work.

Mr. O’Donnell said: “She will open herself up to every scurrilous allegation. She will not enjoy one minute of this litigation. They’ll hire a bulldog, and it’ll be a bloodletting.”

Meanwhile HarperCollins, which owns ReganBooks, would probably face uncomfortable questions about why it tolerated Ms. Regan for so long if the company found her behavior so objectionable.

And executives would also have to submit to a detailed examination of their decision-making process in the Simpson project, a book titled “If I Did It” and a television interview conducted by Ms. Regan, which unleashed such a cascade of public outrage that both were canceled.

“Everything that went on will get into evidence,” [Regan's lawyer] Fields promised. “What really happened with that interview, what Jane Friedman,” the president of HarperCollins and Ms. Regan’s former boss, “is really like.”

Fields promised? Should he be threatening HarperCollins through the good offices of the NYT? Is there an editor in the house?