National Review Online
Saturday, May 24, 2025
The longer Michael Mann maintains his shameful litigation
over a blog post that appeared in NR over a decade ago, the more he loses.
A judge has now ordered Mann to pay $477,350.80 in legal
fees to the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Rand Simberg. This comes on
top of $530,820.21 that Mann has been ordered to pay National Review. It
boggles the mind that, 13 years after launching a lawsuit he hoped would “ruin”
NR, Mann now owes us and our friends more than $1 million, but we warned him not to go down this route in the first place.
For those who haven’t been paying attention, Mann sued
over a blog post written by Mark Steyn that quoted a piece by Rand Simberg of
the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The material that offended Mann was
obviously protected by the First Amendment, and his suit should have been
swiftly dismissed. Instead, it has intolerably dragged on for years. NR was
dropped from the litigation years ago now, but Mann, in a jury trial in D.C.
that never should have happened, got judgments against Simberg and Steyn.
Mann was awarded $1 in compensatory damages and $1,000 in
punitive from Simberg, meaning that he now owes CEI and Simberg roughly 500
times what they owe him.
The court has also found that Mann and his lawyers
deliberately misled the jury during the trial, which bodes very well for Steyn
in his righteous appeal of the verdict. (Preposterously, the jury initially
lodged a $1 million judgment for punitive damages against Steyn, but that was
subsequently reduced to $5,000.)
It’s well past time for Mann to drop his vindictive and
meritless litigation. All indications are that maintaining it is going to cost
him — or any financial backers — dearly.
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