Cruelty on 'American Idol'? Fox Plays Possum

Rupert Murdoch, CEO of Fox parent News Corp., scrubbed the TV show and the book at the eleventh hour, saying he'd discovered it was "an ill-considered project." He discovered it after Fox stations started saying they wouldn't air it and booksellers started saying they wouldn't sell it, or would donate all profits to charity, presumably to ease their sense of corporate shame.

Not long after that, Murdoch sacked Judith Regan, who had headed publication of the book.

Liguori did, however, have a humdinger of an explanation for the latest iteration of Abdul's weird behavior during recent televised interviews promoting the show.

He said he had not seen them, saying his "guys" who were at the interviews told him that she'd just finished talking with about 30 different TV stations over about three-plus hours.

"We had audio problems where she was actually answering questions from a number of our affiliates, and after that amount of time and questions coming from all angles I would probably be a little slap-happy at that point."

Abdul told exactly the same story during the "Idol" Q&A. But she added that when she saw the resulting bizarro interviews, which made their way to YouTube, her reaction was "Oh, my God."

"How does it make you feel when people are in print and on blogs writing you are drunk or drugged?" one critic wondered.

"It's really fun," she answered facetiously. "You know what, I've been in this business 20 years; I've never had to weather the storm" like she has since she's been in "Idol."

"It's the show -- it's huge," she said, admitting her entire previous career as a singer, dancer and choreographer is "almost insignificant because I'm a judge on the world's biggest show.

"I love it, but it's often daunting. Yeah, sometimes it is very frustrating. Like this!"