- LONDON -- David Irving's
London office confirms that a package arrived today (Christmas Eve) from
Laura Tyler of Mishcon de Reya, attorneys acting for Deborah Lipstadt,
containing an application by Deborah Lipstadt in the British High Court
for the transfer to her of all Mr Irving's lifetime possessions, currently
held by the British official Trustee after they were seized in his absence
in May 2002.
-
- Lipstadt is a religious scholar at Atlanta's Emory University.
Her lawyers want the new case heard on January 23, 2004. The Trustee, Baker
Tilly, confirmed this independently in a separate message to Mr Irving
this morning. Mr Irving is currently in the United States.
-
- In the two-page application Lipstadt claims the transfer
to her of all Mr Irving's possessions, properties, and rights; attached
to it is a lengthy listing of all the items claimed, a 150-page inventory
of books, private diaries, microfilms, archives, and other possessions
assembled by Mr Irving in a forty-year career of research and writing.
It is not known how she or her lawyers obtained this detailed list.
-
- Mr Irving, who successfully completed a ten thousand
mile road tour of US cities yesterday, said: "Nothing surprises people
any more in this action. The hatred-filled traditional enemies of free
speech are doing all they can to silence me and my writings, but they will
not succeed. I have friends too."
- Lipstadt prevailed in a widely reported three-month libel
action brought against her by Mr Irving in the High Court in January 2000,
after she called him a "Holocaust denier". Her financial, backers
(who included Steven Spielberg, Edgar Bronfman, the American Jewish Congress
and others), and her co-defendants Penguin Books Ltd., poured eight million
dollars into the London courtroom to pay witnesses, and to hire a team
of conformist historians to support her defence. She is currently completing
a book on the case, announced in the trade press under the title "My
Struggle."
-
- As her financial backers were not party to the action,
she made no application for her costs at the end of the trial in April
2000, and Mr Justice Gray, who heard the action and Mr Irving's subsequent
appeal against the costs awarded to Penguin Books Ltd (who paid none of
their own costs either) wisely made plain in his remarks that she would
not have been granted them if she had.
- _____
-
- As part of their pre-trial defence attempts to destabilise
Mr Irving, a strategy of which Lipstadt boasted in talks in the Middle
East, staff at the law firm Mishcon de Reya arranged for an anonymous hate-wreath
to be sent to him on the funeral of his oldest daughter, a cripple, gloating
over her death in September 1999. Her counsel Richard Rampton QC justified
this hatred when cross-examining Mr Irving in the High Court libel action.
|
