Last year, a Washington D.C. Superior Court jury unanimously found that National Review Online (NRO) and the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) had posted commentaries that were false, defamatory of me, and published with malice. That finding stands today. The jury found that the commentaries by the two authors (Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg respectively) were defamatory and awarded us just over a million dollars in damages in total.
The judge, Alfred S. Irving of the D.C. Superior court (who has been noted for some controversial past judgments) reduced the jury’s award to a mere $5,000 and
At an earlier stage in the case, a Superior Court judge had ruled that NRO was shielded from liability for publishing Mr. Steyn’s commentary. That ruling was based on a technicality from a decision which held that a publisher can only be liable for defamation if the author of the offending writing is its employee. In this case, since Mr. Steyn was not NRO’s employee, the court ruled NRO could not be liable for the article, despite significant evidence that NRO had benefited from its contractual relationship with Mr. Steyn. We have appealed that decision.
Judge Irving in addition ruled that I was responsible to pay a portion of NRO’s legal fees under the District of Columbia’s anti-SLAPP, a law that has been challenged as unconstitutional and may be overturned by the Court of Appeals. We have also appealed Irving’s decision.
However, we have now reached an agreement with NRO wherein we will drop our appeal (whose fate is uncertain) of these decisions in return for NRO dropping their request for costs (of roughly $541K).
While this constitutes the end of a portion of this complex litigation, we would emphasize once again the key points: The jury’s verdict—finding that the posts hosted by NRO and CEI were false, defamatory, and published with malice—stands.
Hopefully, this verdict provides a helpful precedent for other scientists who find themselves subject to malicious and defamatory attacks by individuals and/or organizations that engage in politically-motivated assaults on scientists whose work might be inconvenient to plutocrats and powerful corporate interests (e.g. the fossil fuel industry) to which these organizations are so closely linked.
These attacks, coincidentally enough, are the topic of the book Science Under Siege I recently published with public health scientist and vaccinologist Peter J. Hotez, that details the bad actors behind the concerted assault on science today.
