Ten years ago today, a judge in London handed down one of the most devastatingly lopsided legal defeats ever delivered in a high-profile case. And it went to a man who deserved it quite badly.
David Irving, at one time a best-selling British pop historian of WWII, had been called a Holocaust denier in a American book on the Holocaust denial movement. In response, Irving sued the publisher, Penguin, and the book's author, Professor Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University.
But the perversity of the libel law in the UK, which tips the playing field in favor of the plaintiff to an extraordinary degree, meant that this wasn't simply a ridiculous case filed by a ridiculous man. This was a serious attempt by Irving to silence his critics -- and perhaps shake out a lucrative settlement from the book's publisher, while forcing the book out of distribution in the UK.
Here is how, ten years ago today, Irving found his own reputation destroyed instead.