HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — A Pennsylvania state senator and former Republican gubernatorial candidate whose support for Donald Trump propelled him to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 has sued a Canadian university and nearly two dozen academics for criticizing him and his research on World War I hero Sergeant Alvin York.
Sen. Doug Mastriano’s defamation, racketeering and antitrust lawsuit, filed in a federal court in western Oklahoma, seeks at least $10 million in damages from the defendants, which include history professors and the University of New Brunswick.
A motion to dismiss the case, filed Thursday by one of the defendants, argued that the case violates an Oklahoma law that prohibits lawsuits intended to stifle public debate, that it involves a defamation claim that is legally untenable and that Mastriano is attempting to stretch anti-monopoly and racketeering laws “beyond recognizability to silence critics of his scientific knowledge.”
Backlash to his research claims from experts in World War I history and about 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 the support of former President Trump, lost the race for governor of Pennsylvania the following year to Democrat Josh Shapiro by nearly 15 percentage points.
York was awarded the Medal of Honor for leading American soldiers behind German lines in France during World War I to disrupt machine gun fire. More than 20 German soldiers were killed and 132 captured. A film about York’s exploits earned Gary Cooper an Oscar for Best Actor, and the story was commemorated in comic books.
Mastriano is represented by attorney Dan Cox of Emmitsburg, Maryland, a Republican who lost the 2022 Maryland gubernatorial race and spent most of 2023 as the state Senate’s chief of staff, paying $46 an hour. Cox and Mastriano did not respond to messages seeking comment.
In requesting the case be dismissed, University of New Brunswick administrators and staff called it “a dispute over academic protocol that should have been resolved by an education committee but is instead disguised as an international conspiracy.” They argued that Mastriano’s claim of personal harm does not constitute the type of competitive harm required for an antitrust claim.
Mastriano, the university defendants said, “does not allege precisely what he alleges is false and defamatory about the statements” they allegedly made. They called the lawsuit “vague, conclusive, and utterly incomprehensible.”
University officials and attorneys did not respond to requests for comment.
Mastriano argued in a filing that he “does not have to recite the libel word for word, and thereby become his own purveyor of what is untrue, in order to properly defend a libel claim.”
The lawsuit, filed in May, describes Mastriano as “the victim of a years-long racketeering and antitrust enterprise that sought to derivatively steal, exploit, and then expose his work and strip it of its equity and market,” costing Mastriano millions in “tourism-related events, validated museum artifacts, books, media, television and film deals.” He says his publisher has “significantly reduced publications” and halted potential second editions of his books.
He claims he was denied a job at the university, that his book sales have declined, and that the criticism disrupted his short-lived interest in pursuing the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in 2024. As a result, he says, he has endured “sleepless nights, physical illness, and extreme emotional pain and suffering.”
The lawsuit states that Mastriano has been rated 100% disabled by the Veterans Affairs (VA) administration, but the retired colonel fails to explain how his service in the U.S. military “took a heavy toll” on him.
He sued University of New Brunswick President Paul Mazerolle and the faculty’s vice president of research, Professor David MaGee, as well as Professor Drew Rendall, who, a few months before the 2022 election for Pennsylvania governor, made public Mastriano’s dissertation, which was based on his research into York.
Another defendant is James Gregory, who, as a graduate student and researcher in World War I history at the University of Oklahoma and York, filed a complaint of academic fraud against Mastriano at the University of New Brunswick. Gregory is now the director of the William A. Brookshire LSU Military Museum in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
“Mastriano claims 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 antitrust violation — it’s democracy.”
The University of New Brunswick has reviewed the events surrounding the decision to award Mastriano a doctorate for his York research in 2013, and has created an investigative committee whose work was done out of public view. Mastriano has sued three individuals he claims were part of the committee, and they have also argued in a lawsuit that the case should be dismissed.
Mastriano said he was in regular contact with Trump in the months after Trump lost the 2020 election and tried to overturn the results. Mastriano was scheduled to speak on the steps of the U.S. Capitol in 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 that he broke no laws and has not been charged.
