Claudine Gay is no longer the president of Harvard after 50 examples of plagiarism were exposed throughout her academic career. It was a charge she could not survive. However, Gay should’ve been booted for her atrocious remarks regarding calls for Jewish genocide on college campuses and whether that was an activity that, at the very least, constituted harassment. She could not. Days later, Gay’s academic record was exposed as fraudulent.
The liberal media couldn’t defend it, as professors, including Harvard, admitted that there were papers where “duplicated language” was discovered with no attribution. The Left claimed that Gay’s resignation was soaked in racism and that conservatives were weaponizing plagiarism against academia. Excuse me, it’s not like the latter is some minor infraction—it’s a career-killing move. People in this field already 'weaponize' it to keep scholars accountable.
This clown show set up shop at Business Insider, which opted to go after the wife of Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager who is pro-Israel. Ackman has refused to hire any pro-Hamas scum, warning that blacklists could be drawn up for recent graduates wanting a career in finance who hold pro-terrorist sympathies.
Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, allegedly plagiarized portions of her doctoral dissertation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She apologized for missed citations, but these oversights aren’t like Gay’s plagiarism. The reporting is so shoddy that the publisher for Business Insider wants an internal review because he wasn’t pleased with the work (via Wall Street Journal):
Since acquiring Business Insider nine years ago, Axel Springer has largely steered clear of intervening in the news outlet’s editorial operations, even when high-profile people objected to unflattering articles about them.
That hasn’t been the case in recent days.
The German media company said it is reviewing the process and motivations behind a recent BI article accusing designer and former professor Neri Oxman of plagiarism. The review comes amid complaints from Oxman’s husband, the hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, about the publication’s reporting tactics.
Ackman has registered his concerns in a flurry of X posts and said he texted with a BI director, urging the company to retract the article pending a probe. “Every minute more damage is created,” Ackman wrote to the director. Axel Springer was particularly concerned about Ackman’s suggestion that anti-Zionism was at play in the reporting process, a notion BI insiders reject.
The article wasn’t taken down, but Axel Springer’s review has dismayed BI staffers, from senior editors to rank-and-file journalists, who think the parent company shouldn’t have gotten involved, say people familiar with the situation.
And Ackman continues to be on the offensive against these charges against his wife:
Our lawyers used the Wayback Machine to check MIT's plagiarism policy back when Neri wrote her thesis in 2009.
It turns out that MIT's academic integrity handbook did not require citation or even mention Wikipedia until 2013, four years after Neri wrote her dissertation and used Wikipedia for the definitions of 15 words and/or terms. Bear in mind that 2009 was still pretty early days for Wikipedia.
Interestingly, Business Insider also used the Wayback Machine to research MIT's plagiarism policy, but only when they cited it to manufacture plagiarism claims against Neri:
"MIT’s academic integrity handbook notes that authors must either “use quotation marks around the words and cite the source,” or “paraphrase or summarize acceptably and cite the source.” Identical language appeared in MIT’s handbook at least as far back as 2007."
[From Business Insider's initial email to Pershing Square of Jan. 3, 2014, 1030pm]
What are the chances that Business Insider examined the MIT handbook "as far back as 2007" and didn't notice that there was no requirement to cite Wikipedia nor was it even mentioned until April 4, 2013 when the following language was added:
"Wikipedia is Not a Reliable Academic Source
Many of us use Wikipedia as a source of information when we want a quick explanation of something. However, Wikipedia or other wikis, collaborative information sites contributed to by a variety of people, are not considered reliable sources for academic citation, and you should not use them as sources in an academic paper. The bibliography published at the end of the Wikipedia entry may point you to potential sources. However do not assume that these sources are reliable – use the same criteria to judge them as you would any other source. Do not consider the Wikipedia bibliography as a replacement for your own research."
To be clear, Neri did not use Wikipedia as a source, but only for the definitions of 15 words and/or terms for her dissertation.
While there was no way for us to do this research in the 91 minutes we were given before Business Insider published its story, our lawyers found it in about 24 hours.
This finding wipes away 15, or more than half of the plagiarism claims made by Business Insider at 5:19pm last Friday night.
According to the Cornell Law Legal Information Institute:
In order to prove "prima facie defamation,"
"a plaintiff must show four things:
1) a false statement purporting to be fact;
2) publication or communication of that statement to a third person;
3) fault amounting to at least negligence; and
4) damages, or some harm caused to the reputation of the person or entity who is the subject of the statement."
This leads me to a few question for the @X legal community.
If you look at all of the evidence that has emerged over the last few days, do you think Neri has been defamed under the four factor test above?
What exposure does Axel Springer have to claims at Business Insider in light of the fact that it has been on personal notice from me at a board and CEO level about Business Insider's wrongdoing for more than 54 hours and it has yet to issue a corrected statement about its investigation nor de-published the articles.
Axel Springer has not updated its statement that:
“While the facts of the reports have not been disputed, over the past few days questions have been raised about the motivation and the process leading up to the reporting — questions that we take very seriously"
Do you think the facts have been sufficiently disputed?
I have two questions for the private equity and finance communities:
What is the net worth of Business Insider?
What is the net worth of Axel Springer?
Is there a lawsuit on the horizon? Neri Oxman isn’t a public figure.
I'm not a defamation lawyer but I do know that for "public figures" the standard is much harder to meet. Neri would have to show that BI acted with malice. In any potential lawsuit, the "public figure" question will be the central question since it is difficult to prove malice.
— Michael Eshaghian, Esq. (@LAIPAttorney) January 9, 2024