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Lipstadt says Happy Holidays,
demands all Mr Irving's possessions turned over to her
http://www.fpp.co.uk/Legal/Penguin/Lipstadt_demands_all.html
London - Dec. 24, 2003 -- 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.
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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.
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