NORRISTOWN, PENNSYLVANIA – Judith Regan left the stand at Bill Cosby’s criminal trial Wednesday morning completely disgusted with his lead defense attorney Tom Mesereau.
Mesereau had asked her a series of questions she felt were a “desperate attempt to smear me,” calling it a "sleazy” lawyer technique, Regan said —and she never got to answer them because the judge didn’t permit it.
Regan and ghostwriter Pablo Fenjves were listed as prosecution supporting witnesses for Janice Dickinson, who testified last week that Cosby drugged and raped her in 1982 at Lake Tahoe. Dickinson said she’d tried to include the rape in her 2002 memoir No Lifeguard on Duty but was told to take it out by Regan, her publisher, who said the legal department feared they would be sued should they include it.
ADVERTISEMENT
“I find it demoralizing that the legal system is so tainted by this kind of behavior,” Regan, now the CEO of Regan Arts, told The Daily Beast.
“It’s demoralizing and discouraging. You really always hope in a courtroom the truth will come out and when you have someone who’s as skilled as he is at muddying the waters, the goal is not to get at the truth. The goal is to muddy the waters; it’s to get his client off. I find it repugnant.”
Mesereau also accused her of putting untrue information in the books she published. Regan said Mesereau emailed her in January 2016 asking for her advice on getting his own book published, an email she shared with The Daily Beast.
“It's ironic that he asked for advice from someone whose credibility he so falsely aggressively and viciously attacked,” she said.
Mesereau did not have an immediate response but Cosby spokesman Andrew Wyatt did.
"Saint Peter has been given direct orders from JESUS and HIS Father, not to let Judith Regan near the pearly gates,” Wyatt wrote in an e-mail. “However, they have informed Satan that he will have a guest by the name of Judith Regan coming in on a rocket and she’s wearing gasoline stilettos."
Regan later responded, calling the statement " perverted, misogynistic and frankly, bizarre statement alleging that I am going to hell '...on a rocket...wearing gasoline stilettos.' Seriously? His shameful and derogatory slur is representative of this pack of wolves' predatory views of women. It's no surprise given who he represents."
Mesereau also accused her of putting untrue information in the books she published. Regan said she had an email exchange with Mesereau in January 2016 in which he asked for her advice on getting his own book on “governmental misconduct, injustice and the media,” an email she shared with The Daily Beast.
“It's ironic that he asked for advice from someone whose credibility he so falsely aggressively and viciously attacked,” she said.
Wyatt said she was the one who approached Mesereau about doing a book.
Regan confirmed that she had.
“I withdraw my interest,” she said. “A book about injustice from him? Gimme a break."
Regan confirmed Dickinson’s account on the stand Wednesday morning and to The Daily Beast. So did Fenjves.
“I just knew she was telling me the truth,” Regan said. “Janice is colorful...but Janice never said anyone else raped her. She was very emotional about this issue…You don’t make something like this up. She was upset it wasn’t going to be in the book and she was really tortured.”
Regan reached out to The Daily Beast Wednesday after her testimony to clear the record – and answer those questions posed to her by Mesereau.
“You spent years working with the National Enquirer, correct?” Mesereau asked her Wednesday morning.
“I worked there in the ‘70s and ‘80s and mainly did stories on people who survived heart wrenching things: people who were buried alive, people who were Siamese twins and doctors made an attempt to separate them,” Regan told The Daily Beast. “I interviewed a mother who went coast-to-coast in search of a diagnosis for her dying daughter who was at the same time being accused of neglect. Everything had to be on tape everything was on tape and analyzed by the legal department.
“Nothing I did at the National Enquirer was a lie,” she added.
Mesereau also referenced her work with OJ Simpson’s book, If I Did It.
“Did you help hide the money?” he asked.
“To claim that I was involved in some criminal enterprise with him [Simpson] is…the lowest of the low,” she said, adding that she got a confession of sorts from Simpson in 2006 that aired on the Fox network last month.
“I’ve never seen a lawyer stoop to such a grotesque level. And it’s appalling. It’s ludicrous. Absurd. Grotesque. It would be like asking him, ‘Did you try to rape that woman?’It’s outrageous.”
Mesereau’s next question was about another book.
“You also published Jenna Jameson’s book How to Make Love Like a Porn Star?’” he asked.
“In terms of Jenna Jameson-the subtitle is A Cautionary Tale,”
Regan said. “It’s actually about a woman who was sexually exploited as a teenager and continued to be. Hardly a book that promotes porn and quite the opposite as it depicts the dark side of that tragic story.”
Fenjves didn’t end up testifying at Cosby’s trial but confirmed Dickinson’s account to The Daily Beast on Wednesday evening.
“She went into a lot of detail, most of it pretty horrifying, and fell completely apart,” Fenjves said. “When she finally pulled herself together, I told her that we would not be able to include that story in the book. I believed the story—after all these years, she was still very deeply affected, even by the memory—but I didn’t think we could get away with it, legally speaking.
“I spoke to Judith Regan about it, and she agreed with me, and I believe she bounced it off the legal team. In any event, the true story never made print,” he said.
The decision to just say in the book that Dickinson just called it a night with Cosby and went back to her room was his, he said.
“I bounced it off Janice, and she accepted it, reluctantly,” he said. “She still wanted to tell the truth, even though she knew that that wasn’t going to happen.
“If I had to do it over again, I probably would have written it a little differently,” he added. “Maybe I could have said, “That evening with Cosby was a truly horrible experience, and I’ll never forget it.’ But the lawyers told me I can’t describe what happened, so ‘you’re going to have to use your imagination.’ I’m not sure I could have gotten that past the lawyers, either, but it would have been a better choice.”
