Audrey Streb writes for the Daily Caller about a steep bill assessed to high-profile climate alarmist Michael Mann.
A Washington, D.C., court ordered University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann to pay nearly $500,000 in legal fees combined to the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and writer Rand Simberg on Thursday, 13 years after Mann first filed a defamation suit against the writer and think tank.
In February 2024, Mann initially won his defamation trial against conservative writers Mark Steyn and Simberg, both of whom criticized his “hockey stick” climate model as flawed. However, Judge Alfred S. Irving of the D.C. Superior Court ruled Thursday that Mann must pay CEI and Simberg $477,350.80 in attorney’s fees within thirty days under the Anti-SLAPP Act, a law that provides legal protection to safeguard public speech.
Mann was previously ordered in January to pay National Review — another defendant in his defamation suit —approximately $531,000. Between the two orders, Mann is now on the hook for approximately $1 million in payments to people and organizations he initially sued.
Mann first sued Steyn, Simberg, CEI and National Review in 2012 for defamation over criticism of his work, particularly his climate “hockey stick” graph.
“Despite some claims proceeding, the Court of Appeals determined that some of Dr. Mann’s claims were indeed without merit, eliminating all of the claims against CEI related to its own speech that in turn significantly narrowed discovery and limited the remaining litigation to whether CEI could be held vicariously liable for Mr. Simberg’s blog post,” Irving’s ruling reads.
D.C. Superior Court Judge Jennifer M. Anderson, who was previously on the case, ruled in 2021 that National Review could not be held to “actual malice” from Mann’s suit, but Steyn and Simberg were eventually found by a jury to have defamed Mann.
Notably, Irving determined in March that Mann and his attorneys had misled the jury in the defamation trial that concluded in February 2024.
