![[Freelance]](../gif/fl3H.png)
Tax researcher may face a SLAPP SLAPP
IT HAD to happen. but it‘s still grimly surreal. Researcher Dan Neidle of Tax Policy Associates has been hit with a lawsuit for defamation. One of the grounds set out in a summary of the the claim against him is that in his earlier reporting he alleged that “his legal claim against the Defendants is abusive and intended to suppress scrutiny”. In other words, he is being sued for saying that his being sued is... bad.
A SLAPP is a “strategic lawsuit against public participation” - a legal action whose purpose is to shut down reporting or commentary, for example. If Dan is being sued for complaining that a lawsuit against him is a SLAPP, that would make this claim a SLAPP SLAPP - or a “meta-SLAPP” if you prefer Greek prefixes.
The Freelance won‘t go in to the details of the original claim of defamation made by a barrister who objected to a February report on tax avoidance and suggested that he had lost £8 million of work due to it. Interestingly, we have failed to find a part of the formal particulars of claim that deals with allegations of action “intended to suppress scrutiny”.
We cannot claim that this is the first meta-SLAPP without reading a great many legal filings.
On 24 October Dan wrote on BlueSky “Lots of people asked, but I won‘t be crowdfunding this because I expect to win.”
1 November 2025
Be careful what you wish for
Anti-SLAPP legislation does not always work out in favour of people reporting the truth.
Back in 2012 National Review Online (NRO) and the Competitive Enterprise Institute posted commentaries by Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg on the work of climate scientist Michael E Mann that accused him of scientific and academic misconduct: Simberg wrote that Michael had “molested and tortured data” and compared him to a then-notorious child molester. Steyn wrote that Simberg “has a point”.
Michael sued - not something that scientists often do. In February 2024 a Washington DC Superior Court jury awarded just over a million dollars in damages.
But judge Alfred S Irving reduced the award to $5000 following arguments about errors in financial evidence. He also ruled that Michael was responsible for $530,000 of NRO’s legal fees under the District of Columbia’s anti-SLAPP law. That law is being challenged as unconstitutional - though for example the US National Women’s Law Center is vehemently in favour of it.
The outcome is that on 30 October Michael agreed to drop an appeal of Judge Irving’s decisions in return for NRO not demanding those costs. He is left, as he puts it, with “the jury’s verdict - finding that the posts hosted by NRO and CEI were false, defamatory, and published with malice“ - but with no compensation and (the Freelance infers) bearing his own costs so far.
I’m being sued for £8m for a report on tax avoidance taxpolicy.org.uk
It’s the costs, not the damages Duncan Campbell at our March 2023 meeting