Bonnie Fuller: 'The Bill Parcells of Publishing'

Bonnie Fuller has taken some knocks since she stepped down as editorial director of American Media last week, but she's got support from an unlikely advocate: Kent Brownridge, the CEO of Alpha Media and Fuller's former boss-cum-competitor.

"Bonnie has gotten a bad rap," Brownridge said this afternoon. "Everywhere she's gone she's improved where they were measurably in a short period of time. We ought to be giving her a lifetime achievement award."

Can this be the same man who urged his then-boss, Jann Wenner, to hire Fuller to edit Us Weekly in 2002, rehabilitating her career following a fall from grace at Glamour, only to have her turn around a year later and jump ship to AMI a year later? The same man who told The Wall Street Journal, in 2004, "Bonnie can't delegate. She's computer-illiterate. She doesn't know what a budget is"? (The "computer illiterate" part is especially cutting now that Fuller is rumored to be working on a women's networking website.)

"I'm guilty of having said bad things about her," Brownridge acknowledges. "She's the Bill Parcells of publishing. Just like Parcells, everywhere she goes she pisses people off, but everywhere she goes she wins."