After 12 Years, Michael Mann’s Defamation Case against Mark Steyn Finally Goes to the Jury By Ryan Mills
After nearly 12 years, a jury will finally decide whether conservative pundit Mark Steyn and science writer Rand Simberg defamed climate scientist Michael Mann in blog posts that accused him of misconduct and compared Penn State University’s investigation of him to its investigation of Jerry Sandusky, the school’s child-molesting former football coach.
The case has important implications for the free-speech rights of critics to comment freely on controversial matters without fear of legal reprisals.
The jury began deliberating around 4 p.m.
During closing arguments on Wednesday, Mann’s attorney, John Williams told the jury that the statements against his client were “clearly” defamatory, the comparison to Sandusky was direct, and it “implied that he was the moral
He said that Mann was “horrified” by the comparison to Sandusky, felt like a “pariah,” and “it still affects him emotionally.” He said that the blog posts on the websites of National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute led to a drop in Mann’s grant funding.
He said Simberg’s conduct was “reckless” because he “never, ever took the time to read the actual studies he was attacking.” He called Mann’s hockey stick graph, which shows spiking global temperatures over the last century, a “brick house.”
“People huff and they puff, and they have not been able to blow it down,” he said.
But Victoria Weatherford, Simberg’s attorney, said that her client “truly believed in his heart” that what he wrote was true, and his blog post was protected by the First Amendment.
“Professor Mann is a public figure, and our First Amendment makes sure that each of us is free to comment on the most important issues of public concern without fear of being censored or silenced or bullied into submission,” she said.
“Rand is just a guy, just a blogger voicing his truly-held opinions on a topic that he believes is important,” she said, “and that is an inconvenient truth for Michael Mann.”
Weatherford said Williams was trying to “flip the burden of proof” onto the defendants. She said Williams and Mann failed to show that Mann was defamed, and that there is no reason to believe the blog posts “caused Michael Mann any harm at all.”
She said it is “ludicrous” to claim that a post by Simberg — “an internet blogger who nobody has heard of” — had any impact on Mann’s reputation in his community or in the scientific world. And his attorneys presented no evidence or witnesses to back up their claims that the blog posts by Simberg and Steyn were in any way responsible for a drop in his grant funding.
“Michael Mann had 12 years to line up those witnesses and emails, and he had nothing,” she said. Rather than pursuing grants, she said, Mann “spent his time after 2012 traveling the world, giving speeches, on book tours, being featured in movies, appearing on television, meeting with presidents, political candidates and celebrities.”
Steyn, who represented himself in court, called the trial “a waste of everybody’s time,” and repeatedly told the jury that there is “no case to answer.”
In a 2012 blog post on National Review website, Steyn called Mann’s research “fraudulent.” He was commenting on a post by Simberg on the CEI website, which made a crude analogy between the investigations into Mann and Sandusky.
In his post, Steyn distanced himself from the Sandusky analogy, but added that “he has a point,” and that “Mann was the man behind the fraudulent climate-change ‘hockey-stick’ graph, the very ringmaster of the tree-ring circus,” a reference to climate data obtained through the analysis of tree rings.
Because he is a public figure, Mann needs to prove that Steyn and Simberg not only made false statements about him, but acted with actual malice in doing so.
Seated in a wheelchair after well-publicized health struggles, Steyn said that he stands by “the truth of every word I wrote about Michael Mann, his fraudulent hockey stick, and the corrupt investigative process of Penn State.” He said “Mann has entered no evidence — not a jot, not a tittle — to demonstrate that I secretly knew what I was saying was false.”
He said any harm to Mann’s reputation was more likely caused by his connection to the 2009 Climategate scandal involving the hacking of a climate research computer server and the release of emails that some argued pointed to a global-warming conspiracy.
“Unlike Rand Simberg’s statement or mine, Climategate was a major international news story, widely reported across the planet,” Steyn said.
Steyn said he never compared Mann to Sandusky. “Read the post,” he told the jury. “I compared the Penn State investigation into [Mann} with the Penn State investigation into Sandusky, because it’s a valid comparison at a corrupt institution run by a corrupt president.”
And he mocked Mann’s claim that receiving a “mean look” from a shopper at a Wegmans supermarket was evidence that he had been harmed by the blog posts.
“We don’t know whether the guy who gave him a mean look, as he put it, did so because he reads Rand Simberg or because Mann cut him off in the parking lot,” Steyn told the jury. “We don’t know whether he shot that mean look because he reads Mark Steyn or because Mann beat him to the last avocado.”
Steyn called Mann “glib and facile,” “sly and slippery,” a “vanity plaintiff,” and a “humbug with no case,” and he accused him of “giving erratic and contradictory testimony.” The jury would “do a justice in your great republic” by “putting a definitive end to this nonsense,” Steyn said.
Mann’s lawyers only called three witnesses in the trial. At one point in the trial, Superior Court Judge Alfred Irving said the plaintiff’s case appeared disjointed, and he said that testimony from two of his witnesses seemed to have very little relevance.
Mann’s team also introduced evidence that misrepresented his grant funding by $9 million. Weatherford accused the plaintiffs of showing the jury “something he knew was wrong.”
Testifying for Mann, John Abraham, a professor of thermal sciences at the University of St. Thomas School of Engineering in Minnesota, said that Mann has an “excellent reputation in the paleo-climate community,” and that his research has been “reproduced over and over and over again,” and is “the gold standard.”
He suggested that after Simberg’s and Steyn’s blog posts came out, Mann “was too risky to have on a paper,” because other scientists would be “skittish or scared” to co-author with him. But Abraham acknowledged under cross-examination that he doesn’t know of any scientists who refused to work or publish with Mann because of the posts. And he said that he eventually brought Mann onto a paper in 2020 after he “felt enough time had lapsed for this whole Climategate thing to die down.”
Testifying as an expert witness for the defense, Abraham Wyner, a University of Pennsylvania statistician who has reviewed Mann’s work, said that Mann was involved in the “improper manipulation” of data and that his hockey stick graph “is misleading.” He said Mann’s methods produced results “that greatly understate the uncertainty and greatly overstates the connection of proxies to temperatures on a global scale.”
Other defense witnesses testified that the tenor of the debate over climate science at the time of the Simberg and Steyn blog posts was “really nasty,” and that Mann actively participated in attacking his critics and the lowering the bar of the debate.
Steven McIntyre, a mining industry executive and vocal critic of Mann’s hockey stick graph, testified that Mann accused him of engaging in “pure scientific fraud,” and called him “human filth” and an “asshole.” Judith Curry, a climatologist and professor emeritus at Georgia Institute of Technology, said Mann called her a “serial climate dis-informer” in a Huffington Post article and he “destroyed my academic career.” She said Mann also made false accusations against her in an email implying that she was “just a woman sleeping my way to the top.”
Other defense witnesses called Mann a “troll,” said he was “thin-skinned,” “quick to attack,” and that he has a reputation as “combative, bullying, unpleasant to deal with.”
Williams said the defense witnesses were “biased,” and that their attempts to condemn Mann’s behavior was akin to “victimizing the victim.”
“I agree with the defendants on one thing, the tenor of the debate in climate science has been overheated and rancorous,” Williams said. “But the fact that Dr. Mann has spoken out in harsh terms is not a defense. Dr. Mann has become a huge target for people who challenge or deny climate science.”
Mann sued Steyn, National Review, Simberg, and CEI in 2012. National Review maintained that Steyn had offered opinion protected by the First Amendment and that it was posted by a non-employee. Both National Review and CEI were removed from the case in 2021.
In a 2012 email, Mann wrote that he hoped to use the lawsuit to “ruin” Steyn, whom he referred to as a “pathetic excuse for a human being.” Mann also wrote in private exchanges that there was “a possibility that I can ruin National Review,” which he referred to as “this filthy organization,” a “threat to our children,” and beholden to “greedy fat cat corporate masters.”
The trial kicked off in mid January in Washington, D.C.
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