A prolonged feud between two physicists in Italy that has played out for years in journal letters and blog posts has resulted in a defamation award for one of the rivals.
Lorenzo Iorio and Ignazio Ciufolini have sparred for more than 20 years over claims of plagiarism, sock puppetry and defamation. After two criminal lawsuits against Iorio failed, Ciufolini took the spat to civil court where the Court of Rieti on April 15 ordered Iorio to pay Ciufolini €15,000 (roughly US$17,500) for defaming Ciufolini in blogs and online journals.
In her eight-page decision, Honorary Judge Francesca Tosi said the statements Iorio made about Ciufolini, which date back to 2011, were more than “mere criticism” justifying a difference of opinion.
“It is observed that the defendant, in all his writings, deliberately sought to cast the plaintiff in a negative light, undermining his honor and reputation with offensive statements,” according to a machine translation of Tosi’s decision. “Case law has long held that, ‘honor and reputation constitute inviolable personal rights, guaranteed by the Constitution, the infringement of which gives rise to the injured party’s right to compensation for non-pecuniary damage, regardless of whether the harmful act constitutes a criminal offense.”
Ciufolini did not return messages seeking comment.
Iorio said he disagreed with the decision, but told Retraction Watch he had no intention of appealing and “wasting time on these matters.”
“Naturally, I consider the outcome of this civil case to be erroneous and the compensation awarded to the opposing party excessive, both in absolute terms and relative to the specific case,” he said. “The bitterness remains because in a civil proceeding, the damage suffered by the injured party must be objectively quantified based on specific analytical criteria, and it doesn’t appear to me that this was done by the judge in the civil case.”
Ciufolini and Iorio are both active in the field of gravitational physics and general relativity. Iorio is the current editor-in-chief of the journal Universe, an MDPI title. Ciufolini was principal investigator for the Laser Relativity Satellite (LARES) and LARES II, a pair of satellites launched by the Italian Space Agency to test Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
The beef between the two goes back to at least 2004 when Iorio accused Ciufolini of plagiarizing him in a Nature letter that addressed Einstein’s theory of general relativity as it relates to Earth-orbiting satellites.
We first learned about the feud in 2014 when The Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology removed a letter by Iorio accusing Ciufolini of using pseudonyms to criticize other physicists on arXiv.org. ArXiv moderators later outed Ciufolini as the true author of the criticisms, but then changed course and removed the accusation, as we previously reported. The moderators ultimately removed the critical submission altogether, noting it was posted by an apparent pseudonym in violation of arXiv policies.
Iorio later levied critical comments on articles about Ciufolini on the Science website, on Neuroskeptic and on the website of the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. Ciufolini sued Iorio twice in criminal court for defamation in 2011 and again in 2014. Iorio was acquitted in both suits.
In the latest defamation case, the parties participated in an oral hearing that Tosi wrote “partially” confirmed the plaintiff’s claim. Witnesses testified Ciufolini was “embittered” and “embarrassed” by Iorio’s comments, and that he checked the internet daily to see if Iorio had posted anything about him.
“The documents filed and the oral proceedings revealed the facts that caused the plaintiff harm to his dignity, honor, and reputation in the workplace,” Tosi wrote in her decision. “With regard to the latter aspect, defamation can have a devastating impact on the victim, generating a sense of inadequacy, a crisis of self-esteem, and the possibility of losing job opportunities and collaboration proposals, especially when, as in the present case, the defamation occurred in the digital environment.”
In addition to the €15,000.00 in civil damages, Tosi ordered Iorio to reimburse Ciufolini for litigation costs totaling €545.00 (about $633) and €5,077.00 (about $5,900) for professional fees.
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