Mark Steyn’s Last Laugh Isn’t Over Yet: The Latest Twist in the Hockey Stick Legal Saga

It would not have been surprising at all that a visitor to Mr. Mark Steyn’s home in New Hampshire, USA, on the evening of March 4^th would have heard the popping of bottles of champagne being opened and the clinking of glasses amidst cheerful toasts. On that Tuesday, Justice Judge Alfred S. Irving, Jr. of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia issued a long (over 14,000 words) Final Judgment Order, reducing the punitive damages charged against Mr. Steyn from an astronomical $1 million to a modest $5,000 in a 12-years long defamation suit launched by the plaintiff Dr. Michael Mann in October 2012.

If that visitor would have gone to Mr. Steyn’s home last night (March 12^th), he would probably have heard more popping of corks and clinking of glasses celebrating a further decision by the same judge. In an eviscerating judgement, the court ruled that Dr. Mann and his counsel acted in “bad faith” on multiple occasions in presenting false claims related to the plaintiff’s grant funding. Judge Irving said:

“Here, the Court finds, by clear and convincing evidence, that Dr. Mann, through [his lawyers] Mr. Fontaine and Mr. Williams, acted in bad faith when they presented erroneous evidence and made false representations to the jury and the Court regarding damages stemming from loss of grant funding. . . The Court does not reach this decision lightly.”

The judge wasn’t mincing his words in writing of Mann and his two lead lawyers as follows:

“They each knowingly made a false statement of fact to the Court and Dr. Mann knowingly participated in the falsehood, endeavoring to make the strongest case possible even if it required using erroneous and misleading information.”

The judge further admonished Dr. Mann in the latter’s claims denying these charges of bad faith and false representation of losses in grant funding, accusing of conduct “bordering on frivolity”:

"Dr. Mann's assertion that there was no falsehood or misrepresentation in his testimony or his counsel's conduct borders on frivolity…the record plainly shows the deliberate and knowing misconduct of Dr. Mann's counsel in eliciting false testimony from Dr. Mann and misrepresenting his grant funding…Dr. Mann's counsel's bad faith misconduct is an affront to the Court's authority and an attack on the integrity of the proceedings warranting sanctions."

The court was convinced that “the record plainly shows deliberate and knowing misconduct of Dr. Mann’s counsel in eliciting false testimony” which was presented to the court and jury. The court awarded monetary sanctions to each defendant (Mr. Rand Simberg and Mr. Mark Stein) who can now sue for expenses incurred in responding to Dr. Mann’s bad faith and conduct. The monetary sanctions awarded to each defendant were appropriate in the Court’s view because

“the misconduct of Dr. Mann and his counsel (1) was extraordinary in its scope, extent, and intent; (2) subjected a jury not only to false evidence and grievous misrepresentations about a crucial part of Dr. Mann’s case, but also to additional trial proceedings for correcting the record and the jury’s impressions thereof that otherwise likely would have been unnecessary; (3) further complicated a trial already rife with convoluted and difficult legal and factual issues; and (4) burdened Defendants and the Court with the time-and resource-intensive task of ascertaining the true extent of the misconduct and determining appropriate remedial measures for the same, all without any meaningful acknowledgement of the nature of the misconduct by Dr. Mann or his attorneys.”

Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied: The Process Is The Punishment

I wrote in these pages on Sunday (March 10^th) about the legal “hockey stick” saga which took place over 12 years with multiple suits, counter suits and interlocutory actions and costing millions in legal fees. The judgement delivered yesterday is probably not the end of the matter, and it is not clear what the quantum of fees will be that each of the defendants can claim from Mr. Mann’s bad faith misconduct in the trial. But recovery of legal costs by the two defendants cannot compensate for the time consumed, the psychic and health harms caused and the sheer anxiety that such legal ordeals can exact from its victims.

For interested readers, a short timeline of the main events of the “climate trial of the century” will be informative:

July 2012: Rand Simberg of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) published a blog post criticizing Mann's “hockey stick” chart, controversially comparing him to convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky by stating that Mann had "molested and tortured data." Shortly after, Mark Steyn referenced Simberg's post on the National Review's blog, labeling Mann's work as "fraudulent."

October 22, 2012: Michael Mann filed a defamation lawsuit in the District of Columbia Superior Court against Mark Steyn, the National Review, Rand Simberg, and the CEI, alleging that their statements were defamatory.

December 22, 2016: The D.C. Court of Appeals ruled that Mann's case against Simberg and Steyn could proceed, stating that a "reasonable jury" could find against the defendants.

May 2019: National Review's Special Motion to Dismiss prevailed in large part, with the court dismissing Mann's libel claim based on editor Rich Lowry's "Get Lost" post and the broader intentional infliction of emotional distress claim against National Review. However, the defamation claim based on Mark Steyn's blog post was not dismissed, allowing that part of the case to continue.

March 19, 2021: The D.C. Superior Court granted summary judgment in favor of the National Review, stating that actual malice could not be imputed to the company based on the state of mind of an independent contractor like Steyn.

January 16, 2024: The rescheduled trial commenced. After deliberations, the jury found that both Simberg and Steyn had defamed Mann. The jury awarded Mann $1 in compensatory damages from each writer, $1,000 in punitive damages from Simberg, and $1 million in punitive damages from Steyn.

March 11, 2024: National Review filed a motion in the Superior Court for the District of Columbia to recover a portion of the legal fees incurred during the litigation, seeking over $1 million from Mann.

January 7, 2025: The court issued a decision awarding National Review $530,820.21 in attorneys' fees and costs.

March 4, 2025: The Superior Court of the District of Columbia reduced the punitive damages against Mark Steyn from $1 million to $5,000, deeming the original award "grossly excessive and unconstitutional."

March 12, 2025: The court sanctioned Michael Mann's legal team for misconduct during the trial, ordering them to pay a portion of the defendants' legal fees. The court cited improper conduct during discovery and trial proceedings as the basis for these sanctions.

Free Speech and the Corruption of Science

After jury deliberations in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia found the defendants Simberg and Steyn guilty of defamation in January 2024 which ordered the extremely steep punitive damages against Mr. Steyn, Dr. Mann co-authored an article in the New York Times entitled “A Slap Shot Against Climate Denial.” He claimed that scientists like himself documenting the “fact” that Earth’s temperature has been rapidly rising since the early 20^th century due to the use of fossil fuels “continue to face attacks that threaten their research, reputations and livelihoods.”

He asserted that “[t]he assault on climate science has grown broader and more sophisticated.” In support of this assertion, he cites the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund which warned that sweeping and “invasive open records requests” to harass and intimidate and “other misuse of the legal system” continue to “threaten climate scientists’ ability to freely conduct research and openly share it with the public.”

Dr. Mann hopes that the finding of the Washington DC jury against the defendants for defamation “sends a broader message that defamatory attacks on scientists go beyond the bounds of protected speech and have consequences.” He asserts that his legal case against Steyn and Simberg “is part of a larger culture war in which research is distorted and the truth about the climate threat is dissembled.”

Calling his critics “climate deniers” engaged in a “broader war on science”, Dr. Mann claimed that the trial “has drawn a line in the sand.” “Scientists,” he said, “now know that they can respond to attacks by suing for defamation.” Dr. Mann and his academic and political allies cast those who disagree with them as “climate deniers”. The mainstream media (here and here) largely portrayed the “hockey stick” trial as one that pit “climate deniers” against “climate science.”

Climate science of course is cast as settled and indisputable. The epithet “climate denier” is intended to invoke Holocaust denial, an objectionable, tasteless and inapt comparison. Climate change is not like the Holocaust, nor is questioning the accuracy and predictive power of climate change models like questioning the historical fact of a genocide that murdered 6 million Jews.

In March 2025, the tables turned against Dr. Mann when Justice Judge Irving Jr. slashed the $1 million punitive damage awarded against Mr. Steyn to $5,000. Judge Irving took cognizance of the Supreme Court’s suggestion that a "single-digit ratio" (e.g., 4:1, 5:1, or even 9:1) between punitive and compensatory damages is generally the upper limit for constitutionally permissible awards. While the $5,000 award in punitive damages is still 5,000 times the compensatory damage award of $1 (a 4-digit ratio), nevertheless the absolute amount charged against Mr. Steyn was no longer prohibitive. It was within Mr. Steyn’s 2024 request to the judge to drastically reduce the punitive damages, which he argued should be “$5,000 or less.”

The March 2025 order no doubt helped prevent the legal system from being used as a tool to intimidate and silence critics (like Mr. Steyn) of the prevailing climate narrative. When Steyn and Simberg petitioned the Supreme Court (unsuccessfully) to take the case in 2019, Chief Justice Alito made a rousing defense of free speech in his dissent. When the speech in question bears upon contentious policy issues, Justice Alito observed that “When allegedly defamatory speech concerns a political or social issue that arouses intense feelings, selecting an impartial jury presents special difficulties.”

Alito said “when . . . allegedly defamatory speech is disseminated nationally, a plaintiff may be able to bring suit in whichever jurisdiction seems likely to have the highest percentage of jurors who are sympathetic to the plaintiff’s point of view.” Liberal Washington DC juries were bound to punish Mr. Steyn, a high-profile conservative commentator. He has appeared in conservative national media networks such as Fox News and as a guest host for Rush Limbaugh on contentious topics including the culture wars and Covid.

Even in the febrile politically correct atmosphere of Washington DC, the irony of the latest twist in the “hockey stick” trial cannot have escaped any reasonably objective observer. The self-claimed noble scientist Dr. Mann – after all, what could be more noble than saving the planet from global warming – accused of concocting a fraudulent “hockey stick” chart of global warming in the court of sceptical scientific opinion was found guilty of fraud in no uncertain terms in a court of law. In short, the hero feted in mainstream media turned out to be the anti-hero.

In the “climate trial of the century,” Mr. Steyn seems to have come out on top so far at least. And so has free speech in the contested area of climate change.