In March, I had the surreal occasion of reading a story by Hellbender Press contributor J.J. Stambaugh that helped me prepare myself for sworn testimony on behalf of my former employer, The University of Tennessee in Knoxville, after an extremist group sued them to try to get emails related to my HuffPost story, “Coal Knew, Too,” published in 2019.
The case took several years to work its way through Circuit Court, and now it’s wrapped up. J.J.’s courtroom analysis is HOT. Spoiler alert: the conspiracists lost their frivolous lawsuit.
I chose to speak on the record for J.J.s first story in case UT lost and had to fork over any correspondence that might get twisted into propaganda. I didn’t want the case to become a distraction from the main narrative that the coal industry not only knew about climate change in 1966, it was warning the public about it in the industry journal that my then-colleague Prof. Chris Cherry stumbled on completely apart from his research in engineering.
I wasn’t worried that propagandists could discredit me, but I’m also thankful they didn’t get an inch of anything to twist out of context—at least not in my name. The woman at the center of the case has already published her post-courtroom propaganda piece. Naturally, she’s a hard-core climate denier.
The experience made me keenly aware of the privileges that journalists have in the U.S. despite our falling in press freedom rankings worldwide. When I spoke with UT about the case after I was subpoenaed in 2020 and again this year, I unknowingly waived my privilege to enact the journalist shield and avoid having to testify. Lesson learned. Testifying was not the worst thing I’ve ever been through, but I still had to repeatedly remind myself on the stand that I did nothing wrong. The prosecution was trying to trip me up and would have relished seeing me stumble.
It’s wild to me that an organization I’ve never heard of could drop what was probably a cool six figures for what would amount to a minor blip in the conspiracy news cycle. It was a real-world lesson in not taking journalistic privilege for granted and doing my part to understand the law.
Thank you to J.J. for the courtroom analysis!
Élan Young 