Pennsylvania Sen. Douglas Mastriano's Libel Claims Made Clear

Mastriano v. Gregory (W.D. Okla.) involves a lawsuit that’s mostly about a controversy related to Pennsylvania state senator Douglas Mastriano’s Ph.D. thesis (in military history). Some backstory, from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (Aidan Cox):

The University of New Brunswick has become the target of legal action by a Republican politician in Pennsylvania who’s accusing the school of leaking his doctoral thesis and of participating in a scheme to discredit his research on a First World War hero.

Doug Mastriano, a U.S. Army veteran and state senator, is suing UNB and several of its faculty members following a wave of criticism directed at the thesis he wrote on Sgt. Alvin C. York that earned Mastriano a PhD from the university in Fredericton.

“Defendants embarked on a racketeering enterprise to deprive Col. Mastriano of his intangible property interests in his PhD, his books, and his speaking engagements,” says the lawsuit, filed in Oklahoma by lawyer Daniel Cox….

The lawsuit says it was filed in that court because James Gregory …, one of the named defendants, lives in that jurisdiction….

The lawsuit also includes a libel claim, but the alleged libel at the heart of Mastriano’s libel claim (one of several claims in the case) was sealed, and parts of an online article that is claimed to be the basis for the lawsuit was redacted. I successfully moved to intervene and unseal those exhibits (you can see them here and here), and it turns out that the libel claim isn’t about the thesis after all. Rather, it stems from a letter sent in the name of UNB History Department faculty that condemns Mastriano on ideological grounds, e.g.,

Mastriano’s public statements reflect an anti-2SLGBTQQIA+, Islamophobic, sexist, racist, anti-science, violently authoritarian ideology antithetical to our values.

The letter goes on to generally denounce anti-transgender policies, and proposes a Queer History Month event, sets forth plans for a new graduate scholarship “which recognizes the importance of lived experience that equity-seeking groups bring to historical studies,” and says students will be invited in Queer and Black History months programs and the like.

It seems to me that these claims will go nowhere, because general allegations of racism, sexism, Communism, Marxism, etc., are treated as opinions—and thus not legally actionable—rather than as provable or disprovable factual assertions. For more on that, see this post from Friday, this post from 2021, and this amicus brief that discusses the Pennsylvania law on the subject (the law that is likely to be applied to a Pennsylvania politician’s libel claims). The letter is also apparently unconnected to James Gregory, the one defendant who resides in Oklahoma and may thus be within the jurisdiction of the federal court in Oklahoma (to oversimplify slightly).

But in any event, now we can understand the claims that Sen. Mastriano is bringing.

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