Mann v. Steyn: Finally Ready for Appeal?

from THE MANHATTAN CONTRARIAN

Francis Menton

Way back in 2012, climate “scientist” Michael Mann, then at Penn State University, sued four defendants for defamation. The four were commentators Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg, who had written blog posts about Mann, and National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, entities which had respectively hosted the Steyn and Simberg posts. The occasion for the Steyn and Simberg posts was that independent investigator Louis Freeh had issued a Report that had castigated Penn State President Graham Spanier for having whitewashed the conduct of the university’s assistant football coach, Jerry Sandusky, in a sex abuse scandal. Steyn and Simberg had compared Spanier’s exoneration of Sandusky to his exoneration two years previously of the university’s star climate science professor, Mann, after the so-called “ClimateGate” emails had shown Mann deeply involved in data manipulation schemes to support the narrative of climate apocalypse.

Here we are now in 2026, more than 13 years later. The Mann v. Steyn case has gone through a truly incredible procedural history, including multiple motions to dismiss, two appeals to the D.C. Court of Appeals (different from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals), a certiorari petition to the Supreme Court, a jury trial after remand (in 2024), and a bevy of post-trial motions. I have previously had numerous posts covering this case, including the trial and subsequent developments. My most recent post was this one from March 2025, covering decisions by the trial judge (Alfred Irving of the D.C. Superior Court) on most of the post-trial motions.

A few days ago, on January 22, the Judge Irving finally issued a decision that appears to resolve the last of the post-trial motions. Most notably, the judge has now put numbers on the amounts that Mann will be required to pay to Steyn and Simberg for having presented false evidence at trial and thus having put those two through the effort of disproving the false evidence. However, the amounts are quite modest in the context of the vast resources that have gone into fighting this battle: Mann is ordered to pay $11,404.80 to Steyn, and $16,762.82 to Simberg.

As I reported in my March 2025 post, the high point of the case for Mann came in February 2024, when the jury returned its verdict. Although the jury awarded Mann only one dollar of “nominal” damages against each of Steyn and Simberg, it awarded $1 million of punitive damages against Steyn, and $1,000 of punitive damages against Simberg. (National Review and CEI had previously been dismissed from the case on motions.). Mann and his media acolytes immediately took to gloating on social media about his great victory.

But before long the “victory” turned to dust. In January 2025 Judge Irving awarded National Review some $540,820.21 in fees and costs from Mann, under a D.C. statute that entitles prevailing defendants in defamation cases to recover their fees. On March 4, 2025, in his decision on post-trial motions, the judge reduced the punitive damages award as against Steyn from $1 million to $5000. And then on March 12, 2025, Judge Irving issued another order on a motion for sanctions against Mann, in which he lit into Mann for having presented to the jury false evidence of his supposed damages. The March 12, 2025 Order invited Steyn and Simberg to submit evidence as to how much Mann’s bad faith conduct had cost them in incremental fees and costs.

Now in his January 22 Order, Judge Irving not only puts numbers on the award of sanctions, but also provides a new summary of the misconduct that led him to award sanctions against Mann. A piece of that summary is worth quoting here:

Dr. Mann throughout this litigation complained that he suffered lost grant funding directly stemming from the defamatory statements of Messrs. Simberg and Steyn, while providing very little in the way of specifics about the dollar amounts of his losses directly attributable to the statements (such as corroborating testimony from percipient witnesses), all while promising to illuminate the Court at trial. At trial, Dr. Mann elected through his attorneys to present to the jury a blown-up demonstrative, without redaction or explanation, a demonstrative intentionally prepared for its use at trial, which included a budget (loss) amount of $9,713,924.00, when the correct amount, previously corrected during a third round of discovery, was $112,000. . . . While Plaintiff and his attorneys find nothing wrong with such practice, the Court simply cannot condone such bad faith litigation tactics.

It’s fair to say that Mann’s bad faith trial tactics got Judge Irving very, very angry.

As far as I can tell, this Order resolves the last remaining issues in this case at the trial court level. At Steyn’s website, the comment is “Next stop in Mann vs Steyn? The Court of Appeals.”

Meanwhile, some other things have changed during the passing years. In October 2025 National Review put up a piece headlined “Michael Mann finally goes away,” in which they report that “Mann has finally dropped any claims against us.” The brief piece contains no information as to any payment of money from one side to the other, or what happened to the $500,000+ award of sanctions that NR had recovered against Mann. It is possible that there was a payment of some sort that the parties agreed to keep confidential, but my inference would be that NR walked away from the sanctions award in order to avoid further years worth of appeals. After all, Mann’s efforts appear to be funded by wealthy backers with essentially infinite deep pockets.

Also while this case has been endlessly going on, in 2022 Mann moved his base of operations from Penn State to the University of Pennsylvania. There he flaunts the ridiculous title of “Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science and founding director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media.” Well, University of Pennsylvania, you now have a “Presidential Distinguished Professor” who has been adjudicated to have lied under oath to fabricate a damages case, and to have engaged in “bad faith litigation tactics.” And yet they continue to support him as some kind of hero, I guess because he is on the right team. Other Penn professors who are actually serious scholars but find themselves not on the right team (e.g., Stanley Goldfarb, Amy Wax) get completely different treatment.