A Penn climate scientist was awarded $1 million in a defamation case. Now he owes that much to those he sued.

Things have gone from good to bad to worse for renowned University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann as fallout from his 2024 victory in a defamation trial against two right-wing bloggers and their publishers continues.

After winning a $1 million verdict, Mann suffered a series of court losses that resulted in a judge reducing the verdict to $5,000, sanctioning the scientist, and ordering him to pay the attorney fees of those he sued.

Those fees crossed $1 million last week, when Judge Alfred S. Irving of the District of Columbia Superior Court ordered Mann to pay an additional $477,000 in attorney fees for expenses incurred by two other defendants.

“My lawyers and I believe that the fee award entered by the trial court was not correctly decided, and we intend to seek further review of that award,” Mann said in a statement. ”In the meantime, we also are pursuing an appeal from the trial court’s earlier ruling reducing the punitive damages awarded to me by the jury and other errors.”

Mann, who joined Penn from Pennsylvania State University in 2022, sued bloggers Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn, as well as the National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, in 2012 over a pair of articles that attacked his scholarship. In one article, Simberg called Mann the “Jerry Sandusky of climate change,” referring to the disgraced Penn State football coach.

“Instead of molesting children, [Mann] has molested and tortured data,” Simberg said in an OpenMarket.org article, according to the complaint.

Steyn referenced Simberg’s article in a piece in the National Review, calling Mann’s research “fraudulent.”

A 2024 jury in D.C. sided with Mann, and awarded him $1 million from Steyn and $1,000 from Simberg in punitive damages, and $2 in compensatory damages ($1 from each writer).

In January, Irving ordered Mann to pay $530,000 to the National Review, which the conservative magazine requested under a law that offers protection from retaliatory lawsuits aimed to censor speech.

» READ MORE: An acclaimed Penn scientist won a $1 million verdict in a defamation case. Now he’s facing court sanctions.

Then, in March, Irving reduced the verdict against Steyn to $5,000, calling the original award “grossly excessive.” The judge also sanctioned Mann and ordered him to pay attorney fees related to the “erroneous” grant funding data his legal team presented.

Part of Mann’s case was that his grant funding was affected by the bloggers’ statements. But the figures he presented at trial were incorrect.

For example, Mann’s attorneys presented an exhibit that said the scientist had a $9.7 million grant, but the budget of the grant was only $112,000.

The misrepresentation was “an affront to the Court’s authority and an attack on the integrity of the proceedings,” Irving said in his March opinion.

And in the latest blow to Mann, Irving ordered that the scientist pay $477,000 in attorney fees to the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Simberg, under the same anti-retaliatory law the National Review cited.