“It pretty well described a version of what we know today as climate change. Increases in average air temperatures, melting of polar ice caps, rising of sea levels. It’s all in there,” Cherry said shortly after the discovery.
Cherry told Young — who was a part-time UT public relations employee at the time — about the surprise discovery, and it soon became international news when a story written by Young was picked up by HuffPost.
UT promoted the article on its website on Dec. 2, 2019, and two days later Marquardt submitted a request to UT officials under the auspices of the Tennessee Public Records Act.
Marquardt is the author of several books and vice-president of the American Policy Center, a think thank founded by right-wing conspiracy theorist Tom DeWeese.
She has described herself online as “an avid supporter of constitutional rights, promoter of civility, sound science, and reason” who is “dedicated to exposing the fallacies of the radical environmental and animal rights movements.”
In her request to UT, Marquardt sought to review several months of e-mails to or from Cherry that contained one or more of the following keywords/phrases: “Mining Congress Journal,” “Coal,” and “climate change.”
Over the following six months, however, UT officials repeatedly failed to turn over the e-mails, ultimately arguing that “a substantial body of common law supports the position that the presence of an e-mail on a University server does not convert an otherwise personal e-mail into a public record.”
Marquardt then filed a lawsuit seeking to force UT to turn over the emails. The lawsuit slowed to a crawl with the arrival of the COVID pandemic.
On March 28 and April 10, lawyers from the two sides finally got to question both Cherry and Young in front of Judge Ailor.
“Ms. Young’s testimony was clear that when Dr. Cherry found this article, he found it as a result of another University professor cleaning out that professor’s office,” Ailor wrote in his opinion. “He read through it, thought that it was something that might be of interest to others, and he contacted Ms. Young …
“Ms. Young, in her individual capacity, not having anything to do with her work for the University, decided to pursue it outside of the University; and said that she shopped it around to several publications,” Ailor continued. “She finally at some point got the attention of the Huffington Post. And so her testimony was clear that everything that she did with regard to this article, with the exception of talking to Dr. Cherry about how he found the article, was paid for by the Huffington Post, was directed by the Huffington Post, and the University did not have anything to do with it.”
Lawyers from UT refused repeated requests for comment, but Young issued the following statement this week: “In the run-up to publication of ‘Coal Knew, Too,’ I understood that freedom of the press was instrumental to a democratic society. However, in the wake of the lawsuit, I realized how little I knew about the legal nuances of First Amendment protections for journalists. It’s my hope that this ordeal might prompt other journalists to learn about their rights before getting dragged through the legal system.”
Marquardt didn’t respond to numerous requests for interviews.
In an article published on the CFACT website, however, Marquardt argued that UT “doesn’t want us to know about the biased manner in which they use our taxes to advocate a radical energy agenda,” and attempts to argue the issue of global warming is part of a liberal plot to control the world.