Real History and the Last Ditch defence of Wrong History Documents on the your Lipstadt trial indexthe fight over your seized assets your Deborah Lipstadt dossier your Lipstadt trial index Lipstadt’s new claim index She now effectively finds herself banned from a country, too, unless she wants an unfriendly visit from the High Court tipstaff, who will escort her straight to Holloway — or Pentonville, as the case may be.
February 27, 2004 (Friday) London (England) AT twelve noon exactly we walk into the Court. Registrar Jaques again hears the matter [ Deborah Lipstadt vs. David Irving and the Trustee of his seized estate ]. The hearing, set down for fifteen minutes, lasts two hours — well into his lunch break. It revolves around the question of my historic “archive”, collected during forty years of writing and seized in May 2002, which the Trustee is currently housing in a warehouse in Brighton.
The question to be decided is whether it is valuable or not. An expert should survey it and decide. I want to point out that it is all immaterial anyway, as it is 100 percent certain that the archive and library will be returned to my possession eventually, as a result of my own application of October 15, which the High Court will eventually hear at the same time as Lipstadt’s more recent application for everything to be handed to her.
But today I do not speak: I am a silent observer in the back row of the Registar’s Court room. The Registrar begins by saying that he blames himself for leaving open last time ( February 9 ) the question of who pays the “expert,” as that is why we are inevitably back here today. Andreas Gledhill , counsel for Deborah Lipstadt , speaks well, but on balance my own, Adrian Davies, is better — less stern and clipped in his manner, though sometimes slightly indistinct in his elocution.
The two barristers are both experts in the Chancery division, but have different styles. The final decision after much argument back and forth is this: that the “expert” (they avoid the phrase “expert witness” which has a precise meaning in law, e.g.
the expert witness Richard “Skunky” Evans ) will be an academic historian appointed by Lipstadt, and not by the Trustee as Registrar Jaques himself had proposed last time (Gledhill submits that the Trustee is manifestly no longer neutral as between the parties); but he also directs that Lipstadt shall also pay the expert’s costs. That will please her, they will run into thousands of pounds!
Gledhill’s half-hearted suggestion that she should be able to recover the costs from the estate if the archive is sold for a profit, is not addressed. It is all academic anyway, as my application for the return of everything to me will succeed in the long run. Adrian makes effective use of the fact that Lipstadt has taken