Doug Mastriano sues university, academics for criticizing dissertation

State Sen. and former GOP gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano is suing his former university and nearly two dozen academics over criticism of him and his research into one of World War I’s most celebrated soldiers, Sgt. Alvin York. 

The defamation, racketeering and antitrust lawsuit, filed in federal court in Oklahoma, seeks at least $10 million in damages for criticisms of Mastriano’s book, "Alvin York: A New Biography of the Hero of the Argonne". Mastriano alleges that the criticisms prevented him from getting university job opportunities, reduced his book sales and 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.”

“Defendants embarked on a racketeering enterprise to deprive Col. Mastriano of his intangible property interests in his Ph.D, his books, and his speaking engagements,” says the lawsuit, filed in Oklahoma by lawyer Daniel Cox, who had spent time as Mastriano’s chief of staff.

The case comes years after Oklahoma historian James Gregory raised academic misconduct concerns about Mastriano’s research at the University of New Brunswick in Canada. Mastriano sued Gregory in May of this year after Gregory reported more than 200 instances of potential academic misconduct in Mastriano’s doctoral dissertation about Sgt. York.

Gregory, represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, known as FIRE, is now an adjunct professor at Louisiana State University, where he also works as a museum curator while finishing his doctorate. 

“This is Mastriano’s own work against Mastriano,” Gregory told City & State. “All he had to do was show me the documents and say I was wrong. But he’s never actually provided any evidence to show I was wrong…It feels like the final act of a desperate man.”

FIRE asked the court to dismiss the case on Thursday, arguing that not only are Mastriano’s federal claims baseless, but that his defamation claim is subject to an Oklahoma law that allows courts to swiftly dismiss lawsuits targeting protected speech. 

Gregory came across Mastriano’s biography on Sgt. York in 2018 while doing his own research on York, but after professors contacted him saying work he cited from Mastriano’s book was inaccurate, Gregory decided to take a closer look at Mastriano’s work. Gregory said he pointed out 35 cases of academic fraud – including inaccuracies, lack of citations and even fabrication of events – to the University of New Brunswick. Upon reviewing Mastriano’s dissertation, which was the basis for his York biography, Gregory found 213 cases of academic fraud or misconduct. 

“Some of them are just bad historical practice, like quotes with no citations…(or) he’ll quote something, and then his citation will have 15 different sources, which is almost impossible to double-check, and some of them aren’t even right,” Gregory told City & State. “And then they’ll range into just pure fabrication,” citing examples of Mastriano changing data or inaccurately using a photo description to provide evidence for an assertion. 

FIRE argues that the case violates an Oklahoma law against lawsuits designed to stifle public debate, and that Mastriano is trying to stretch the case to antitrust and racketeering laws. Since Gregory first voiced his concerns, 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. UNB and its administrators, also seeking to dismiss the case, 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.”

“There is an ethical responsibility (as historians) to report these things when you find them,” said Gregory, who added that the University of New Brunswick had three unaffiliated historians review Mastriano’s work, although the findings haven’t been published due to Canadian privacy laws. “(UNB) wouldn’t tell me what the result of that investigation was, so I thought it was done and over with until this lawsuit showed up. So obviously it was something that made (Mastriano) mad.”

York was awarded 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, according to the Associated Press.  

Mastriano couldn’t immediately be reached for comment and declined to speak to the AP. 

City & State also reported in 2022, during Mastriano’s gubernatorial run, that a 2002 academic paper he wrote raised eyebrows among war scholars because he stated that the U.S. should “not hesitate” to strike at locals if a military regime is nearby, describing the U.S. military’s “hypersensitivity” to civilian deaths as an “enormous weakness.”