A District of Columbia judge imposed a sanction on Penn professor Michael Mann for providing misleading information at a trial last year.
Credit: Chenyao LiuA District of Columbia judge sanctioned Penn frofessor Michael Mann and his legal team on March 12 for providing misleading information during a defamation trial last year.
In February 2024, Mann — Penn’s vice provost for climate science, policy, and action — was awarded more than $1 million in the suit against bloggers Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn. The case argued that Simberg, a former adjunct fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and Steyn, a contributor to the National Review, had defamed him in a series of blog posts discrediting his climate change research in 2012.
D.C. Superior Court Judge Alfred S. Irving Jr. called disparities in the case “an affront to the Court’s authority” and sanctioned Mann and his legal team "for bad-faith trial misconduct." Irving also threw out the penalty owed by Steyn earlier this month and reduced the damages to $5,000, stating that the verdict against Steyn was “grossly excessive.”
During the trial, Mann's legal team presented a chart listing a grant that Mann allegedly lost due to the defamatory remarks as $9.7 million. However, in a separate testimony, Mann stated the grant was worth $112,000. Comparing Mann’s grant income before and after the accusations from Simberg and Steyn, Mann's lawyers initially claimed a disparity of $2.8 million, while a corrected calculation put it the difference at $2.37 million.
"I am pleased the court upheld the jury’s verdict on the hockey stick graph, the defamatory statements, and the injury to my good name," Mann wrote in a statement on X after The Washington Post first reported news of the sanction. "I am confident neither I nor my lawyers did anything wrong during the trial."
"We were surprised and disappointed by the court's recent ruling imposing sanctions and plan to challenge that ruling because it is erroneous from both a factual and legal standpoint," Peter Fontaine, a lawyer for Mann, wrote in a statement to The Daily Pennsylvanian. "Dr. Mann’s testimony was truthful and candid."
Irving wrote in the decision that the defendants "may have expended additional time and resources in responding to Dr. Mann’s bad faith trial misconduct." The document also noted that defendants must submit supporting documentation for expended fees and costs "within fourteen days of issuance of this Order."
Mann will have fourteen days to file a response.
Mann first filed the suit in 2012 following the publication of Steyn and Simberg’s blog. The pair claimed that Mann had manipulated his data and compared him to Jerry Sandusky, a convicted child molester who served as a football coach at Penn State. They also drew special attention to Mann’s “Hockey Stick” graph which depicted rising historical temperatures, and accused him of “scientific and academic misconduct.”
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