An acclaimed Penn scientist won a $1 million verdict in a defamation case. Now he’s facing court sanctions.
A jury awarded Michael Mann $1 million in his defamation trial against two bloggers. The verdict was reduced to $5,000, and Mann is on the hook for more than $530,000 in legal fees.
A D.C. jury found last year that University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann was defamed by two right-wing bloggers who said he falsified data about global warming. But a judge last week ruled that Mann and his attorneys weren’t honest during the trial — not about climate data, but about grant funding.
Judge Alfred S. Irving of the D.C. Superior Court said in an opinion that Mann and his attorneys misrepresented data on the amount of grant money that the scientist claimed to have lost due to 2012 defamatory statements by two right-wing bloggers. The behavior was “an affront to the Court’s authority and an attack on the integrity of the proceedings,” Irving said.
The judge sanctioned Mann and ordered him to pay related legal fees. It is the third ruling this year against Mann, and represents a reversal of fortune from the $1 million verdict in his favor to the scientist owing those he sued more than $530,000.
Mann, an acclaimed scientist with a significant online presence who joined Penn from Penn State in 2022, sued bloggers Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn, as well as the National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, in 2012 for publishing a pair of articles attacking his scholarship. In one article, Simberg called Mann the “Jerry Sandusky of climate change,” referring to the disgraced Penn State football coach.
“Instead of molesting children, [Mann] has molested and tortured data,” Simberg said in an OpenMarket.org article, according to the complaint.
Steyn referenced Simberg’s article in a piece in National Review, calling Mann’s research “fraudulent.”
A 2024 jury sided with Mann at trial, and awarded him $1 million from Steyn and $1,000 from Simberg in punitive damages, and $2 in compensatory damages ($1 from each writer).
“I hope this verdict sends a message that falsely attacking climate scientists is not protected speech,” Mann said in a statement following the verdict. “It’s a good day for science.”
» READ MORE: Penn climate scientist wins $1 million defamation lawsuit against right-wing bloggers
But earlier this month, Irving reduced the verdict against Steyn to $5,000, calling the original award “grossly excessive.” And last week, the judge sanctioned Mann and ordered him to pay attorneys’ fees related to the “erroneous” grant funding data his legal team presented.
Part of Mann’s case was that the bloggers’ defamatory statements made him lose out on grant funding. To show that impact to the jury, his lawyers presented the number of grants and the amounts in the four-year periods before and after 2012.
Mann’s funding decreased to $500,000 from $3.5 million after the blog posts, John Williams, an attorney who represented Mann at trial, said during opening statements, according to court records.
Attorneys for the defense called the allegation “simply not true,” stating that Mann had no evidence that the decline was tied to the blog posts in question, or even whether grant application reviewers knew of their existence. They also challenged the funding calculations of Mann’s team.
For example, Mann’s attorneys presented an exhibit that said the scientist had a $9.7 million grant, but the budget of the grant was only $112,000.
Mann acknowledged during cross-examination that there was some discrepancy in about 50% of the grants presented to the jury, according to court records, but held that even with the corrections his grant-funding rate decreased dramatically.
Attorneys for both sides and the trial judge came back to the issue of the grants in multiple conversations during trial. Defense attorneys requested that Mann and his legal team be sanctioned for presenting “grossly inaccurate figures.”
In the March 12 sanction decision, Irving said the scientist and his lawyers, “acted in bad faith when they presented erroneous evidence and made false presentations to the jury and the Court regarding damages stemming from loss of grant funding.”
The judge found that Mann “knowingly participated in the falsehood” in an effort to “make the strongest case possible even if it required using erroneous and misleading information.”
As punishment, Mann will pay the attorneys’ fees for the time lawyers spent on the issue.
“I am confident that neither I nor my lawyers did anything wrong during the trial,” Mann said in a X post on Sunday.
Williams said in a statement that Mann’s legal team believes the sanctions were decided incorrectly, and he intends to seek “further review” of the decision.
“Dr. Mann also is pursuing an appeal from the trial court’s earlier ruling reducing the punitive damages award entered by the jury,” Williams said.
Neither Simberg’s attorney nor Steyn, who represented himself at trial according to the court docket, responded to requests for comment.
Irving also ordered the scientist to pay $530,000 to the National Review in January. The counts against the conservative magazine and the Competitive Enterprise Institute were dropped, and the National Review filed a motion requesting that Mann cover their legal fees under a law that protects from retaliatory lawsuits.