Jury Orders Mark Steyn to Pay Michael Mann $1 Million for Defaming Him in Blog Post
A Washington, D.C., jury on Thursday ordered conservative pundit Mark Steyn to pay $1 million in punitive damages to climate scientist Michael Mann, determining that he was defamed in a 2012 blog post on National Review’s website.
The jury also ordered science writer Rand Simberg to pay Mann $1,000 in punitive damages for defaming him in a blog post on the website of the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Mann also won $1 from each writer in compensatory damages from the six-person jury after a trial that started in mid-January and lasted three weeks.
The jury’s decision for Mann could have important implications for the free-speech rights of critics to comment on controversial matters without fear of legal reprisals. In a statement before the jury’s verdict Simberg said the case was about “the ability of myself and others to speak freely about the most important issues of our day, whether climate change or another issue,” according to the Associated Press. “If others are faced with over a decade of litigation for giving their opinions, we will all suffer.”
The case involved blog posts that Simberg and Steyn made over a decade ago criticizing Mann’s science and his “hockey stick” graph, which shows global temperature spiking over the last century or so. In his post on CEI’s website, Simberg accused Mann of molesting and torturing his data, and made a crude analogy between Penn State University’s investigation of Mann and its investigation of Jerry Sandusky, the school’s former football coach convicted of child molestation.
In his post on the Corner section of National Review‘s website, Steyn distanced himself from the Sandusky analogy, but added that “he has a point.” He wrote 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.
The jury found that both Simberg and Steyn had defamed Mann, that they had asserted or relied on provably false statements, that they had a high degree of awareness that their statements were probably false, and acted with “maliciousness, spite, ill will, vengeance, or deliberate intent” to harm Mann. The jury also found that Mann suffered actual injuries because of the blog posts.
Both Simberg and Steyn contended they were expressing opinions protected by the First Amendment.
The verdict comes after Mann’s lawyer, John Williams, was admonished by the court for telling the jury during closing arguments that they could award Mann punitive damages to not only “punish” Steyn and Simberg, but to “serve as an example to prevent others from acting in the same [manner].”
“These attacks on climate science have to stop, and now you have the opportunity,” Williams said, receiving objections from both Steyn and Simberg’s attorney.
Superior Court Judge Alfred Irving told Williams that his comment could lead the jury to believe that “climate science is the subject of this case. This is a defamation case.” Steyn said that Williams was trying to expand the case by turning it into a case between him, Simberg and “the massed ranks of science.”
Speaking to the D.C. jury, Williams also compared people who deny the reality of climate change science to people who deny that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election.
Mann’s supporters were also hoping that the jury would help to muzzle skeptics of climate science. Kate Cell, a senior campaign manager at Union of Concerned Scientists whose work includes tracking dissent in the field, told the AP that she and others were hoping for Mann to “reduce the comfort and regularity with which those who do not accept climate change science speak, and speak very nastily, about climate scientists.”
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.”
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 equivalent of a sex offender.”
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.”
Because he is a public figure, Mann had to prove that Steyn and Simberg not only made false statements about him, but acted with actual malice in doing so.
In his closing argument, 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.”
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