Letters to David
Irving on this Website

Unless correspondents ask us not to, this Website will post selected letters that it receives and invite open debate.

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

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. David Irving