Letters to David Irving on this Website

Brian Hillman thinks Mr Irving's offers to settle the Lipstadt action out of court were spurious, Sunday, October 17, 2004

Offers before the Lipstadt Trial

YOUR offer to settle, coming nearly three years after you started your attempted shakedown, and after the disastrous discovery Order against you, appears to me, and no doubt to countless others, as blue funk.

You had caught a tiger by the tail and you were in urgent need of copious amounts of Imodium.

By the way, you tangled with Professor Lipstadt. You lost. Did you hear about it?

Brian Hillman

Reader's Letter asking questions about the Lipstadt trial

Mr Irving writes to Lipstadt's publisher Penguin, offering to release them from the action

Mr Irving makes a mandatory "Part 36" offer

 

Our index on the Lipstadt Trial

 

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David Irving responds:

HOW very kind of you to write, albeit your letter again demonstrates a degree of ignorance of UK trial procedure and of the facts. I "tangled" with Deborah Lipstadt, true: But the entire wealth of your friends in the American Jewish community then stumbled drunkenly to her aid, with the AJC, Bronfman, and Spielberg (right), and no doubt others who preferred no publicity, pouring their rude and greasy millions of dollars into her Defence.

It was a Defence which her lawyers formally and radically changed in the last weeks before the Lipstadt Trial began, with Gray J's kind consent, inflicting immense extra labour and costs on me; the new Defence was in essence (no surprise here) to pitchfork new and even more malodorous smears on top of the old, indefensible ones.

After that it was plain Balthasar's Feast ("Und sieh', und sieh', an weisser Wand / da kam's hervor wie Menschenhand." - Friedrich Schiller).

I do not recall any "disastrous" Discovery Orders, although we had several pre-Trial hearings on them, as Lipstadt appeared not to appreciate the need to give voluntary full disclosure, and the Court had to whip her into submission. Her Jewish lawyers at Mishcon de Reya used every devious trick (no surprise here either) to conceal crucial items - for example three raw TV newsreel videos which they had secretly obtained, and also a sinister Document Number 500, which showed her Canadian friends (the local Simon Wiesenthal fast-facts concession) advising her, when writing her book, that given my hard-earned and word-wide reputation as an historian it was vital to "eradicate" my "legitimacy". I suspect they would have translated that first word as ausrotten.

Thirteen questions to put to Prof. Lipstadt the next time you see her...

They had asked her to ensure that this sensitive piece of advice, Document 500, did not fall into the wrong hands. "It could hardly have fallen into wronger hands than it has now," commented Master Trench smugly, making an Order (Sept 11, 1998) that Lipstadt now turn over a copy of the document to me; in my view he was not unfriendly throughout these months of interlocutories. He repeatedly ruled that the Defendants should bear the one- or two-day hearing's costs.

So much for Lipstadt's "victory" (she LOST those costs, plus of course the fortune that her friends poured into promoting their Six Million Dollar smear).

Incidentally, prior to changing their Defence the Defendants had succeeded in obtaining an Order striking out of my Discovery all the documents that I had pre-emptively included in it as an attempt to ward off such smears. Now that was something of a disaster. Trench had not seen their purpose or relevancy at the time, although I, anticipating what was to come, of course had.

As for the offers to settle out of court - I made two such offers:

1. the first was on Sept 11, 1998, just moments after Trench made the Order on Document 500 referred to above, and exactly two years after I issued the Libel Writ in Sept 1996 (Lipstadt, living in the USA, had evaded service for several months after that; I had to obtain High Court permission to have the Writ served out of the jurisdiction by diplomatic officials in Atlanta, Georgia; learning of which step she came yelping into line);
2. I made the second offer purely pursuant to the new Rules of the Supreme Court. After being in force for centuries, these were completed changed half-way through my action, a quirk which was not calculated to assist me. The new rules require the parties to serve a last minute mandatory "Part 36 Offer" as an attempt to avoid costly days in Court. My own costs were low, as I was acting in person; it was Penguin's costs (and ultimately Lipstadt's) which were at risk.

One day I shall publish a narrative of the inside story of the Lipstadt Trial. Got other things to do right now.