Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Update on Warman and the Cools post

The wheels of justice, as the saying goes, grind slowly.

Long time readers will remember that I spent a good deal of time in 2008 investigating the allegation that Human Rights activist and lawyer, Richard Warman, had written a nasty racist screed about Anne Cools, and concluded that this was not possible:

  1. the IP address used by the author of the Cools post (which had later been used by Warman) was a load-balancing proxy usable by any of Rogers' close to a million customers;
  2. the browser and setup used by author of the Cools Post was different from Warman's in several key ways (here and here); 
  3. the 'expert' opinion presented by Bernard Klatt arguing that Warman was the author of the Cools post was deeply substandard in several ways (here)
Warman brought a defamation suit against those who had claimed that he wrote that post, and the case has been inching its way through the court.

I have now seen the Court report related to this case (available here). It dismisses with costs the motion of Levant (the defendant) that Warman surrender 12,000 pages of data without redactions for privilege or relevance.

One interesting point that I noticed there, which might be added to those above: 
Two separate Expert Reports (dated December 17, 2009 and April 23, 2010) concluded that (i) there was no evidence Mr. Warman's computer was even turned on the day the Hateful Posting was authored, and (ii) no evidence existed of the Hateful Posting anywhere on Mr. Warman's computer.
To which my response can only be: