Judith Regan may be a thorn in Rupert Murdoch’s side, but that doesn’t mean she’ll help Michael Wolff smear the NewsCorp titan in his new book.

In fact, Regan says she’ll take Wolff to court for referring to her as a “nut” and “reviled figure” in The Man Who Owns the News.

Here’s the background: Regan, fired from NewsCorp’s HarperCollins unit in 2006, settled a lawsuit against the publisher over her dismissal for $10.75 million. She originally wanted $100 million. The former publishing powerhouse sued in November 2007, a year after her plans to publish O.J. Simpson’s If I Did It blew up in her face and helped lead to the end of her reign at HarperCollins. Regan claimed defamation in her lawsuit that NewsCorp asked her to lie to federal investigators about Bernard Kerik, her ex-lover and former New York police commissioner, and tried to destroy her reputation.

Fast forward a bit. Wolff, a Vanity Fair columnist and former college friend of Regan’s, e-mailed Regan after Doubleday signed him to write the Murdoch book. It took a lot of nerve for Wolff to contact Regan asking for her input for the book, since he had already written two particularly nasty profiles of her.

Here’s one, published in Vanity Fair in March 2007, in which Wolff says:

Somehow Judith Regan — the most famous book publisher of her generation, and the would-be Nancy Drew ready to finally close the O. J. Simpson case — has always gotten away with her obscene, grotesque, often funny, Jewish-obsessed, not just politically incorrect but reprehensible, probably slanderous, not necessarily truthful monologues (definitely monologues — she doesn’t really engage in conventional conversation).

Also, her world, on top of being so profitable, is clearly such a harrowing, bleak, sordid place — Hobbesian with a twist of sexual perversity and degradation — that I don’t think anybody wanted to look too closely at it or risk getting drawn into it.

Regan’s response to the New York Daily News:

"Michael Wolff has been obsessed with me and my sex life for close to 30 years. I’m finally going to give him what he wants — he’s going to get [bleeped] by Judith Regan."

Wolff apparently thought that Regan would forget about their rocky past and use his book as an opportunity to lash out at her former employer. 

"Once again, I beseech you: Talk to me," Wolff wrote Regan. "Considering the dreadful things I write about you when you don’t talk to me, it really can’t get any worse by talking to me … Come on, you know how this works. You’re now the NewsCorp whipping girl — so at least put it back to them."

Regan refused, and in the end, Wolff described her in his book as "a nut," "unemployable anywhere else" and "a reviled figure."

Regan then called him “grossly irresponsible,” and “consumed with hatred, vitriol and pathological envy."

She also says of Wolff’s past claim that the two were somehow romantically involved: "He’s having fantasies … He’s a repulsive specimen."

Ouch.

Click here to read the entire Daily News story, with response from Wolff.