Quinn Emanuel Defeats Multi-Billion-Dollar Defamation Suit Against Elsevier in a Victory for Science and Peer Review
Quinn Emanuel secured summary judgment ending Global Plasma Solutions’ five-year, multi-billion-dollar defamation and false advertising suit against Elsevier over a peer-reviewed study published in one of its journals at the height of the pandemic.
In a victory for the world’s leading academic publisher and for scientific publishing as a whole, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina on Oct. 22 held that GPS was a limited-purpose public figure that couldn’t show actual malice.
GPS, a Charlotte-based maker of bipolar ionization air purifiers, sued Elsevier in its home city in 2022. It claimed that a peer-reviewed article published in the journal Building and Environment amid the Covid-19 pandemic was false and defamatory and had destroyed its business.
The article, written by independent scientists from the Illinois Institute of Technology and Portland State University, tested a GPS ionization unit and reported that it reduced some airborne compounds but increased others, including acetone, ethanol, and toluene. The authors were clear about both the study’s methods and its limitations.
The Quinn Emanuel team, led by Rachel Epstein, Ellyde Thompson, JP Kernisan, and Nicholas LoCastro, collected and produced a voluminous record, defended a series of motions to compel, prepared the article’s authors and editor for deposition, and dismantled GPS’s damages model. Taylor Jones, Margaret Schmidt, and Tara Srinivasan were among the other critical members of the team.
The case was a matter of principle for the client and the kind of high-stakes, fast-moving litigation Quinn Emanuel is known for trying and winning. The decision protects the integrity of the scientific publishing process and the researchers who work in it. Scientists who study contested public-health questions in good faith should not be exposed to ruinous litigation because a commercial interest dislikes their results.