N.Y. Times Urges Judge To Dismiss Hatfill Suit

The New York Times Co. yesterday urged a federal judge to throw out a defamation suit filed by a former Army scientist, saying that columnist Nicholas D. Kristof did not intend to implicate the scientist in the 2001 anthrax attacks.

In a series of columns that explored whether Steven J. Hatfill was responsible for the anthrax-spore mailings that killed five people and sickened 17, Kristof was trying "to focus attention on the FBI, to get it to jump-start the investigation . . . not to point a finger at Mr. Hatfill,'' said Lee Levine, a Times company lawyer.

But attorneys for Hatfill accused Kristof of deliberately ruining Hatfill's reputation and said Kristof's editor warned him that one of the columns could be read as implicating Hatfill in the attacks. The editor, Philip Taubman, said in an e-mail to Kristof that the column was "pointing pretty directly at the guy" and urged Kristof to take some passages out before publication, said the lawyer, Mark A. Grannis. Kristof declined, Grannis said.

"He was implicating Dr. Hatfill in a notorious act of terrorism,'' Grannis said. "To pretend otherwise is to just ignore the reality of this case.''

Taubman, now the Times's Washington bureau chief, referred questions to a company official yesterday. David McCraw, assistant general counsel for the Times company, said Taubman was not Kristof's editor "for column content. Nick had sent draft columns to Phil and other colleagues seeking their opinion and advice on them." Kristof declined to comment.

U.S. District Judge Claude M. Hilton in Alexandria did not rule yesterday on the Times's request for a dismissal. Hatfill sued the Times company in 2004, contending that the paper defamed him in a series of Kristof columns that identified him as a "likely culprit." A trial is set for Jan. 29.

The legal maneuvering comes in advance of a trial that lawyers say is expected to shine new light on the government's investigation of Hatfill and possibly on the overall anthrax probe itself. No one has been charged in the investigation of anthrax-tainted letters mailed to media and government offices.

Hatfill, a former researcher at the Army's infectious disease research laboratory at Fort Detrick in Frederick, has been trying to clear his name ever since then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft publicly called him a "person of interest" in the investigation in 2002.

In the 2002 columns, Kristof criticized the FBI, saying it had failed to aggressively pursue a scientist he first identified as "Mr. Z." He wrote that the biodefense community had called Mr. Z a "likely culprit," partly because the scientist was familiar with anthrax.

Kristof later acknowledged that Hatfill was Mr. Z. He also wrote that Hatfill deserved the "presumption of innocence."

Attorneys for the Times said yesterday that Kristof was only trying to focus attention on the failure to solve the case. "The larger issue in the columns was the nation's preparedness to handle biological attacks,'' Levine said.

Hatfill's attorneys contended that Kristof had deliberately fingered their client as the anthrax killer. "Dr. Hatfill was a purely private citizen, as innocent as anyone in this courtroom and as deserving of the protection of his reputation as anyone in this country,'' Grannis said.