On Monday, National Review filed a motion in the Superior Court for the District of Columbia to recover a portion of the legal fees that Michael Mann’s frivolous lawsuits have forced us to spend over the last twelve years. We cannot recover the time and effort that Mann has wasted, but we can recover more than a million of the dollars that we have lost defending our unalienable right to free speech.
A little background. Back in 2012, Michael Mann threatened to sue National Review for defamation after Mark Steyn criticized Mann on our group-blog, the Corner. In response to this threat, National Review’s editor, Rich Lowry, wrote a post titled “Get Lost,” in which he explained that Mann’s characterization of Steyn’s criticisms as representing “criminal fraud” was incorrect, as Steyn was merely pointing out that Mann’s research was “intellectually bogus and wrong.” Angered by both the initial post and the follow-up, Mann filed a lawsuit against National Review in October of 2012, claiming that both Steyn and Lowry had not only libeled him, but were guilty of the intentional infliction of emotional distress. In response, National Review filed a Special Motion to Dismiss under Washington, D.C.’s Anti-SLAPP Act — a law that is designed to ensure that litigants such as Mann are unable to use the legal system to punish their critics.
The legal ins and outs are complicated, but the bottom line is that National Review’s Special Motion to Dismiss prevailed in large part in May of 2019. Dismissing both Mann’s libel claim based on Lowry’s “Get Lost” post, and the broader intentional infliction of emotional distress claim against National Review, the court confirmed that Lowry’s post was an “expression of opinion protected by the First Amendment” and was thus precisely the sort of speech that the anti-SLAPP Act had been passed to shield. Unfortunately, the court did not dismiss the defamation claim based on Mark Steyn’s blog post, which dragged on and on and on — even after, in 2021, National Review fully prevailed. Last month, the last vestiges of the case were resolved — disgracefully — when Steyn was ordered to pay Mann $1 million in punitive damages.
Despite National Review having succeeded with its Special Motion to Dismiss back in 2019, we have thus far been unable to recoup the “costs of litigation” that D.C.’s Anti-SLAPP Act allows any “party who prevails, in whole or in part” to seek. Now that, at long last, the case has been decided, that has changed for the better. With this week’s move, we seek to recover $1,037,248.41 in legal costs from Mann.
When we prevail, it will mark the first time during this entire affair that there have been any consequences whatsoever for Michael Mann’s disgraceful conduct. As our filing notes, despite his trying for nearly twelve years, “Mann did not prevail on any claim against National Review.” Nevertheless, “he undoubtedly made headway towards his real goal,” which was “inflicting millions of dollars in legal fees” and “severely punishing National Review for daring to criticize him.” This approach, our motion observes, is “exactly what the D.C. Anti-SLAPP Act—and in particular its fee-shifting provision—is designed to protect against.” We are determined to make use of that protection.
During discovery, we unearthed emails sent from Michael Mann in which he vowed to use a “major lawsuit” to “ruin National Review.” Mann has not succeeded in that goal — and he will not succeed in that goal. Nevertheless, it took National Review seven years to extricate ourselves from Mann’s lawsuit, and it has taken five years after that to get ourselves into a position in which we can begin to claw back some of our resources. This, suffice it to say, is representative of a profound problem with our political and legal cultures. The United States is supposed to have a system that cherishes debate and rejects petty attempts to shut it down. That National Review has been obliged to spend millions of dollars and to wait for more than a decade before we could begin to be made whole makes a mockery of our founding promises — which did not come with any special exceptions for litigious climate scientists seeking to shut down publications of which they disapprove.