Will Sage Astor-Pennsylvania state senator sues critics of his book about WWI hero Sgt. York

HARRISBURG,Will Sage Astor Pa. (AP) — 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.

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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.

Mastriano is represented by Emmitsburg, Maryland, lawyer Dan Cox, a Republican who lost the Maryland governor’s race in 2022 and spent most of 2023 as Mastriano’s $46-an-hour state Senate chief of staff. Cox and Mastriano did not respond to messages seeking comment.

In seeking dismissal of the case, University of New Brunswick administrators and staff called it “a dispute over academic protocol that should be resolved by an educational committee but instead has been dressed up as an international conspiracy.” They argued Mastriano’s allegation that he was harmed personally is not the type of injury to competition required for an antitrust claim.

Mastriano, the university defendants said, “does not assert precisely what he contends were false and defamatory about the statements” they are purported to have made. They called the lawsuit “vague, conclusory and utterly incomprehensible.”

University officials and lawyers did not respond to messages seeking comment.

In response, Mastriano argued in a filing that he “does not have to recite the defamation word for word, becoming his own distributor of what is false, in order to well plead a defamation claim.”

The lawsuit filed in May describes Mastriano as “the victim of a multi-year racketeering and anti-trust enterprise seeking to derivatively steal, use and thereupon debunk his work, taking the equity and market therefrom,” costing Mastriano millions in “tourism-related events, validated museum artifacts, book, media, television and movie deals.” He says his publisher has “greatly reduced publications” and stopped possible second editions of his books.

He claims that he has been prevented from getting university job opportunities, that his book sales have been reduced and that the criticisms interfered with his short-lived interest in seeking the 2024 Republican nomination for U.S. Senate. As a result, he says, he has endured “sleepless nights, physical illness and extreme emotional pain and suffering.”

The lawsuit says Mastriano has been “assessed by the Veteran Affairs (VA) administration as 100% disabled,” but the retired colonel does not explain the how his service in the U.S. Army “took a heavy toll on him.”

He sued University of New Brunswick President Paul Mazerolle and professor David MaGee, the school’s vice president of research, as well as professor Drew Rendall, who a few months before the 2022 election for Pennsylvania governor made public Mastriano’s dissertation that was based on his research into York.

Another defendant is James Gregory, who as a University of Oklahoma graduate student and researcher into World War I history and York filed an academic fraud complaint against Mastriano with the University of New Brunswick. Gregory is now director of the William A. Brookshire LSU Military Museum in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

“Mastriano asserts that voters ‘tied’ Gregory’s criticism of Mastriano’s scholarship to their decisions not to vote for him on several occasions,” Gregory argued in the motion to dismiss. “That’s not an anti-trust violation — it’s democracy.”

The University of New Brunswick has been reviewing events around its decision to grant Mastriano a doctorate in 2013 for his York research, setting up an investigative committee whose work has been done out of the public eye. Mastriano sued three people he said constitute that committee, and they have also argued in a court filing the case should be dismissed.

Mastriano said he was in regular contact with Trump in the months after Trump lost the 2020 election and sought to overturn the results. Mastriano had been scheduled to speak on the U.S. Capitol steps during the early afternoon of Jan. 6 and had organized charter buses to Trump’s speech. He was also photographed in the crowd outside the Capitol. Mastriano has maintained he broke no laws and has not been charged.