If what Michael Mann has endured is defamation, I want some

After spending the last week in a Washington, D.C. courtroom, I must confess I have grown more confused about the law.

I’ve been covering the defamation trial of Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg, two commentators sued 12 years ago over blog posts they wrote about climate scientist Michael Mann (a far less impressive figure than the Oscar-nominated director of the same name).

Mann is the co-author of the infamous ‘hockey stick’ graph purporting to show 900 years of nothing happening with global temperature (the stick’s handle) followed by a century of dramatic warming (the blade).

It’s the chart used in Al Gore’s apocalyptic film An Inconvenient Truth. It was widely used, including by Canada’s then-Liberal government, as support for pushing countries into the Kyoto Accord. It was also eviscerated by numerous scientists, most notably Canadian researchers Ross McKitrick and Stephen McIntyre (both of whom are being called as witnesses next week).

Steyn and Simberg believe Mann is a fraud and his hockey stick graph fraudulent. They said as much in their 2012 blog posts while also drawing comparisons between Penn State’s treatment of academic misconduct allegations against Mann with Penn State’s cover-up of Jerry Sandusky’s serial rape and abuse of children.

Mann has been prone to saying he was likened to a child molester, which may play well with the jury but happens to be false.

In any event, the trial concluded its third week yesterday. It was supposed to be done by now, but has been extended to next Wednesday. At the rate things have been going, I’m not optimistic it’ll end then, but we’ll see.

Jurors and spectators have heard hours and hours of testimony from Mann and his witnesses. Mann’s lawyers had experts testify about the academic peer review process. A chum of Mann’s shared his speculation that people might be “skittish” about working with Mann over the blog posts. Mann even spoke about the horror he once lived through when a man gave him a dirty look in a grocery store.

I am not a lawyer, but I assumed in covering a defamation trial I might be exposed to something resembling evidence of defamation. How naïve I was.

Virtually every aspect of Mann’s career is better now than it was before Steyn’s and Simberg’s blog posts were published. His salary is higher. He hangs out with celebrities such as Bill Clinton and Leonardo DiCaprio, with whom Mann testified to having a “bromance.” He was then working at Penn State but is now at the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania. He is making more in book royalties.

If this is what harm looks like, I welcome defamation by Steyn and Simberg any day. Seriously, Mark and Rand, feel free to start immediately. I’ll even sketch out a hockey stick if you need.

Even the litigation itself has not come at a cost to Mann, who admitted to having spent no money out of pocket on legal representation (he won’t disclose who is footing the bill).

The only area where Mann has even claimed a loss is in grant funding, but this is dubious. The judge reprimanded Mann’s lawyers for misrepresenting these figures to the jury – calling their trickery “stunning” in an admonition on Wednesday.

While Mann did show a reduction in grants in the period immediately following the blog posts compared to right before, there was no evidence presented linking this to anything Steyn and Simberg wrote.

“You’re never gonna get causation,” Mann’s lawyer John Williams glibly told the judge.

It was honest, at least. In the 12 years this case has been pending, Mann has either been unwilling or unable to find a grant administrator who could testify to passing over him because of what a couple of people wrote on the internet.

It’s worth noting that even if Steyn and Simberg did cause a loss of grant funding, that doesn’t mean they’ve committed a legal wrong. They have a right to their opinions; Steyn has been especially adamant that his piece stands up on truth, which is also a defamation defence.

The United States has famously strong free speech protections under the first amendment, but even without those I struggle to find Mann’s argument.

Now, whether a District of Columbia jury sees it that way is anyone’s guess. But even they must see that Defamation a la Mann seems like a pretty sweet deal.

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