A military museum director at Louisiana State University is mounting a legal counter-offensive against an unsuccessful Pennsylvania U.S. Senate candidate, Doug Mastriano, arguing that the GOP state senator’s defamation lawsuit against him should be dismissed.
The federal motion for dismissal was filed Sept. 19 on behalf of James Gregory Jr. by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) in the Western District of Oklahoma. Gregory, director of the William A. Brookshire Military Museum at LSU, had been a graduate student in Oklahoma when he began scrutinizing Mastriano’s 2014 biography of Sgt. Alvin York, a World War I hero who was reported to have captured more than 130 German soldiers single-handedly.
Gregory eventually reported to the University of New Brunswick in Canada, where Mastriano did his Ph.D. dissertation about York, that he had uncovered 200 issues with Mastriano’s research. Gregory also wrote a 2022 book, “Unraveling the Myth of Sgt. Alvin York: The Other Sixteen,” in which he argues that previous historians have given York too much credit for the capture of the enemy soldiers and that 16 soldiers fought alongside York.
“Historians arrive at the truth by debating ideas, inviting skepticism, and challenging assumptions and sources,” Gregory said in a statement emailed to the Louisiana Record. “By trying to silence that debate, Mastriano is literally on the wrong side of history – and history will prevail.”
Mastriano’s Pennsylvania Senate Office did not respond to a request for comment.
The lawsuit Mastriano filed against Gregory earlier this year argued that the latter’s academic criticism violated the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act and the Sherman Antitrust Act and also defamed him. FIRE called the claims baseless and said that the First Amendment and an Oklahoma law protect citizens’ right to criticize public officials.
The RICO statute is generally used against organized crime figures, while antitrust laws target economic monopolies.
“Mastriano’s lawsuit is a threat to academic freedom,” FIRE attorney Sara Berinhout said in a prepared statement. “Historians settle debates in the marketplace of ideas, not the courtroom. And they certainly don’t argue that their critics are racketeers like Al Capone or John Gotti.”
When he was a graduate student, Gregory initially tried to verify some of Mastriano’s claims in his book but found many citations were not accurate or could potentially have been fabricated, according to FIRE.
“I knew nothing about Mastriano’s political ambitions, and I tend to vote Republican myself,” Gregory said. “But I’m also a historian, and we have a duty to seek out the truth and correct the record.”
FIRE called Mastriano’s legal complaint an example of a SLAPP suit, or strategic lawsuit against public participation. Such lawsuits are designed to quell normal debate by forcing the defendant into costly and time-consuming legal proceedings.
Oklahoma is among 30 states that have anti-SLAPP laws on their books, according to FIRE. Such measures allow defendants to dismiss lawsuits targeting speech that is protected by the First Amendment.
“Mastriano cannot identify any defamatory statement made by Gregory – let alone one made with actual malice or within one year before Mastriano filed this SLAPP,” Gregory’s motion for dismissal states. “With no viable defamation claim, Mastriano tried and failed to stretch the RICO and Sherman Antitrust acts beyond recognition to silence critics of his scholarship.”: