Publishing powerhouse Judith Regan is threatening her former divorce lawyer with “major litigation” for trying to have her arrested when she took her case files from his office after firing him.
“He’s scum. I’m going after him, big time,” Regan told The Post yesterday.
Regan said she fired lawyer William Beslow in March after he nearly defaulted in answering an appeals brief filed by Regan’s ex-husband, Robert Kleinschmidt.
Beslow did not respond to calls for comment.
It’s just the latest chapter in a decade-long divorce battle.
Regan said yesterday she’s already spent more than $1 million in legal fees and referred to divorce lawyers as “the matrimonial Mafia.”
“They’ll do anything to keep the case going,” she said. The high-powered publisher also said the experience has left her bitter.
“I should have been vicious from the start, gone for my ex-husband’s throat and sucked the blood out of his veins from day one,” she said.
“And to end this all with a lawyer who tried to screw me, to hurt me, to try and get me arrested, is just rough.”
Regan claims Beslow refused to return her case files after she fired him.
She said she subsequently showed up at Beslow’s office with a private investigator, and demanded the files from a secretary.
“You know how Judith can be,” a source close to the skirmish said.
“She’s not a wallflower. Let’s just say she got the secretary to get her a cart and helped her cart out the files.”
In the police report, the secretary denies allowing Regan to take the files.
After learning of Regan’s incursion, Beslow called the cops and filed charges against her, according to sources and the police report.
The report says Beslow told cops Regan went “in his office without his permission or authorization and took the [files] without his permission or authorization to do so.”
Sources said Midtown North Detective Kevin Schroeder and another cop showed up twice at Regan’s Central Park West building to arrest her, but she wasn’t home.
A police spokesman declined to comment.
Regan hired lawyer Joseph Tacopina, sources said, who convinced cops that the dispute was a civil matter and an arrest wasn’t warranted. Tacopina declined to comment yesterday.
Regan runs ReganBooks, an imprint of HarperCollins, owned by News Corp., The Post’s parent company.