Mann $1M Lawsuit Award Against National Review Slashed To Just $5k
Being accused of “molesting” data to promote climate alarmism is not worth $1 million in punitive damages, a judge ruled Tuesday in a 13-year-old defamation lawsuit that could have bankrupted the nation’s most venerable conservative magazine
The District of Columbia Superior Court slashed the seven-figure punitive damages awarded to University of Pennsylvania climate ‘scientist’ Michael Mann, best known for his “hockey-stick” graph on ‘climate change’, to $5,000, rejecting Mann’s “entire rationale” for preserving the $1 million award: “deterrence and punishment.”
Just the News covered the trial.
Judge Alfred Irving wrote that Mann “presented no persuasive evidence suggesting that he suffered an injury to his business as a result of” Canadian writer and defendant Mark Steyn’s 2012 article about him in National Review, a blog post that quoted co-defendant Rand Simberg’s blog post for the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
It’s the second blow to Mann’s litigation in less than two months, with Irving forcing the climate scientist to pay National Review half a million dollars in legal fees for eight years of litigation, which ended with summary judgment in NR’s favor in 2021.
“As was made clear during the discovery process, Mann’s explicitly stated intention was to use a ‘major lawsuit’ as a vehicle with which to ‘ruin National Review,’ ” the editors wrote on Jan. 10.
“Between 2012 and 2019 – with the courts inexplicably refusing to apply legal provisions ostensibly designed to prevent frivolous lawsuits such as Mann’s – we were forced to spend a considerable amount of time and money defending ourselves against his malicious, meritless suit,” they wrote. “Between 2019 and now, we have been obliged to expend yet more effort trying to recoup at least some of our costs.”
Pennsylvania State University officials’ coverup of football coach Jerry Sandusky’s child sexual abuse had just been detailed in former FBI director Louis Freeh’s report when Simberg and Steyn wrote about Mann.
Simberg, whose $1,000 punitive damages award Irving refused to touch, wrote that Mann, who was also at Penn State at the time he filed the lawsuit, “could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet.” (CEI removed the comparison within two weeks.)
“Not sure I’d have extended that metaphor all the way into the locker-room showers with quite the zeal Mr. Simberg does, but he has a point,” Steyn wrote, quoting the paragraph in full.
He added that the hockey stick graph was “fraudulent.”
Judge Irving agreed with Steyn that the “million-to-one ratio” of punitive to compensatory damages set by the jury, which awarded one dollar each from Steyn and Simberg to Mann for direct harm, was completely out of proportion given that the D.C. Court of Appeals previously struck down a 145-to-one ratio as “staggering.”
“Interestingly, Dr. Mann does not cite a single case involving claims of defamation or otherwise, in the District of Columbia or elsewhere, that supports” the million-to-one ratio, which even for hard-to-quantify emotional and reputational injury “raises a judicial eyebrow,” the judge wrote.
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