MAIN NEWS HEADLINES
March 14 – March 20, 2008 Edition

Regnery Wins
Arbitration Suit
Against Miniter

WASHINGTON, DC/3/18/08–Regnery Publishing won an arbitration hearing March 14 , allowing it to recover a $150,000 advance paid to author Richard Miniter for a two book deal. His first book, Disinformation, was published by Regnery in 2005, but Miniter never delivered the second book, instead offering a similar work to Simon & Schuster.

Regnery's arbitration preceding was the second round of confrontations between the parties. Miniter and four other authors originally sued the publisher in Federal Court, but the suit was dismissed in November 2007. Thus, Regnery won that round, too. Authors Jerome R. Corsi, Bill Gertz, Lt. Col. Robert (Buzz) Patterson, Joel Mowbray and Richard Miniter had accused Eagle Publishing, which owns the conservative Regnery imprint, of fraud and deception in what they said was a scheme aimed at diverting book sales away from retail outlets to Eagle-owned outlets and book clubs, then selling the books at a deep discounts, thus greatly reducing the authors' royalties.

The court dismissed the case without prejudice on all but three counts, according to Miniter. Before the authors could return to court for any appeals, the judge ordered them to first pursue arbitration, which was just settled this week. Miniter has told the media he may seek to overturn the first ruling. For now, however, the author must pay back the advance to Regnery.

When the November case was settled, Regnery Publisher Marji Ross said, “We are very pleased with the judge’s dismissal of the lawsuit,” We work hard to make every book we publish into a best-seller, and to make every Regnery author both successful and satisfied.”

With respect to Regnery's arbitration case with Miniter, Marji Ross told Authorlink that Regnery and Richard Miniter had a contract. "In our view he breached the contract by only providing one book, then signing with a different publisher. That contract stipulated that any disputes would be settled by arbitration, so we filed the arbitration case to get our money refunded," she told Authorlink in a February interview. In both cases, the ruling favored the publisher.