A Pennsylvania state senator and former GOP gubernatorial candidate whose support for Donald Trump drew him to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 has sued a Canadian university and nearly two dozen academics over criticism of him and his research into World War I hero Sgt. Alvin York.
Sen. Doug Mastriano's defamation, racketeering and antitrust lawsuit, filed in western Oklahoma federal court, seeks at least $10 million in damages from defendants including history professors and the University of New Brunswick.
A motion seeking to have the case thrown out, filed Thursday by one of the defendants, argued that the case violates an Oklahoma law against lawsuits designed to stifle public debate, that it makes a defamation claim that isn't legally viable, and that Mastriano is trying to stretch antitrust and racketeering laws "beyond recognition to silence critics of his scholarship."
Backlash against his research claims by experts in World War I history and on York - and from a faculty member at the Canadian university about how his degree was awarded - was the subject of a March 2021 story by The Associated Press . Mastriano, with former President Trump's backing, lost the Pennsylvania governor's race the following year to Democrat Josh Shapiro by nearly 15 percentage points .
York was awarded the the Medal of Honor for leading U.S. soldiers behind German lines in France during World War I to disrupt machine gunfire. More than 20 German soldiers were killed and 132 captured. A movie about York's heroics won Gary Cooper a best actor Academy Award, and the story was memorialized in comic books.
