David Irving could only afford to represent himself as he went up against Deborah Lipstadt’s generously funded legal team.
Wikipedia: “Lipstadt hired the British solicitor Anthony Julius to present her case, while Penguin Books hired Kevin Bays and Mark Bateman, libel specialist from media firm Davenport Lyons. They briefed the libel barrister Richard Rampton QC and Penguin also briefed junior barrister Heather Rogers. The defendants (with Penguin’s insurers paying the fee) also retained Professor Richard J. Evans, historian and Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, as an expert witness. Also working as expert witnesses were the American Holocaust historian Christopher Browning, the German historian Peter Longerich and the Dutch architectural expert Robert Jan van Pelt. The latter wrote a report attesting to the fact that the death camps were designed, built and used for the purpose of mass murder, while Browning testified for the reality of the Holocaust.”
Tabletmag.com: In 1996, British Holocaust revisionist David Irving sued Deborah E. Lipstadt, author of Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth & Memory, for libel. The book, published in 1993, depicts “those who insist that the death of six million Jews in Nazi concentration camps is nothing but a hoax perpetrated by a powerful Zionist conspiracy.” Among “the province of pseudohistorians,” wrote Lipstadt, was David Irving.
The case closed in 2000, and six years later, Lipstadt published History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier, which depicts her legal battle with Irving. (Lipstadt wrote The Eichmann Trial for Nextbook Press, part of its Jewish Encounter Series).
Yesterday it was announced that Lipstadt’s book had been adapted by British playwright David Hare, who won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Hours.
Hilary Swank, who won the Oscar for Best Actress for her role as a bad-ass boxer in Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby (2004), will play Lipstadt. Tom Wilkinson, who played crime lord Carmine Falcone in Batman Begins, will play a barrister.
The role of David Irving is yet to be cast.
