A Federal court in California has ruled in favor of the popular training program CrossFit in its lawsuit against a nonprofit group — a competitor in fitness training — awarding the workout company nearly $4 million in sanctions.
Why are you reading about this case on Retraction Watch, you might ask? Well, at the heart of the suit, first filed in 2014, was a now-retracted 2013 study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research — published by the NSCA — showing, erroneously, that CrossFit was linked to an increased risk for injuries. The journal initially corrected the article, but as CrossFit noted, the publication never acknowledged fabrication of data.
The senior author of that paper, Steven Devor, resigned his position at The Ohio State University after the retraction in mid-2017. As we reported at the time, the institution had demanded:
That Devor either correct or retract the study, that he take a 33 percent pay cut for the rest of the year, and that he refrain from both serving as a principal investigator and contacting graduate students as long as he remained there.
The scathing ruling, from Judge Janis L. Sammartino of the U.S. District Court of Southern California on Dec. 4, found that the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA):
deceived and continue to deceive the public and consumers regarding the safety and effectiveness of CrossFit training
Judge Sammartino also agreed that NSCA had destroyed documents related to the suit, perjured itself in the matter and committed other legal violations:
Not only is it clear that the NSCA knowingly and repeatedly resisted producing documents that were irrefutably relevant to this litigation, but the forensic evaluation also uncovered evidence that the NSCA destroyed presumptively relevant documents and engaged in mass deletions across numerous devices during the pendency of this litigation.
Indeed, at an October 2019 hearing for the case, the court declared that:
“[t] he severity and frequency of defendant[’s] bad faith misconduct is as egregious as anything this [C]ourt has ever seen or read in any of the cases.”
Mike Hobson, the communications manager for the NSCA, provided this statement to Retraction Watch:
The NSCA does not agree with the findings or conclusions in the December 4, 2019 Order. The NSCA is analyzing the Order in detail, and considering all of its options.
The court gave the NSCA and Crossfit a January 14 deadline to report on agreed-upon payment terms for the $4 million, which is considered a sanction and does not include damages from the case.
CrossFit has aggressively pursued legal remedies in the case, and others. In 2018, the company asked a judge to unmask the peer reviewers for the retracted paper in its search for signs of bias in the article — and convinced the court. And it has pushed for the retraction of another paper, this one in the Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine, suggesting its workouts cause more injuries than conventional weightlifting. So far, that paper still stands.
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