Thanks to New York State’s wise libel tourism laws, reviewers of this film can refer to “historian” David Irving as a holocaust denier secure in the knowledge New York courts will not honor any foreign libel judgments against them deemed inconsistent with our own First Amendment rights.
One would think the ugly spectacle of Irving suing American historian Deborah Lipstadt, forcing her to prove the Holocaust happened would have created a groundswell for libel law reform, but alas, it did not. The high stakes court case gets the big screen treatment in Mick Jackson’s “Denial.”
Irving was once a semi-credible historian, who garnered some favorable blurbs before crossing over to the dark side. By the time Lipstadt’s book “Denying the Holocaust” was published, he was a fringe figure, but he still had a knack for garnering media attention. In a potentially devastating act of libel tourism, Irving sued Lipstadt’s British publisher, Penguin UK, in British courts.
