Hatfill Settles $10M Libel Lawsuit

A former Army scientist named by investigators as a "person of interest" in the 2001 anthrax attacks, Dr. Steven Hatfill, has settled his $10 million libel suit against Vanity Fair and Reader's Digest after the two magazines agreed to retract any implication that the bioweapons specialist was behind the deadly anthrax mailings.

A statement issued today by a lawyer for Dr. Hatfill, Hassan Zavareei, said the case "has now been resolved to the mutual satisfaction of all the parties." He did not indicate whether any money changed hands.

A spokeswoman for Reader's Digest, Ellen Morgenstern, confirmed the settlement, but she would not elaborate. "All I can tell you is we're very satisfied with the results. I can't get into any detail," she said. A call seeking comment from Vanity Fair's parent company, Condé Nast Publications, was not immediately returned.

Dr. Hatfill's lawsuit claimed that he was defamed in an article written in 2003 by an English professor at Vassar College, Donald Foster. Mr. Foster's assessment, first published in Vanity Fair and later carried in abridged form in Reader's Digest, analyzed Dr. Hatfill's writings and travels and found them consistent with patterns seen in the 2001 anthrax attacks, as well as prior hoaxes and suspicious incidents.

"When I lined up Hatfill's known movements with the postmark locations of reported biothreats, those hoax anthrax attacks appeared to trail him like a vapor cloud," Mr. Foster wrote.

Dr. Hatfill has vehemently denied involvement in the anthrax mailings, which killed at least five people and led to the closure of a Senate office building for three months.

The quasi-retractions issued by the two publishing companies and Mr. Foster suggested that readers were mistaken if they took the articles as accusing Dr. Hatfill of the anthrax mailings. "Neither Condé Nast Publications nor the article's author intended to imply that they had concluded that Steven J. Hatfill, M.D., perpetrated the anthrax attacks that occurred in the United States in the fall of 2001. To the extent any statements contained in the article might be read to convey that Condé Nast and Prof. Foster were accusing Dr. Hatfill of perpetrating these attacks, Condé Nast and Prof. Foster retract any such implication," the statement said. The statement from Reader's Digest was essentially identical.

Last month, a federal judge in Virginia threw out a separate libel lawsuit Dr. Hatfill filed against the New York Times over a series of columns about the anthrax case. Judge Claude Hilton said Dr. Hatfill was a public figure and that there was insufficient evidence that the Times printed the columns knowing or strongly suspecting that they were false. Dr. Hatfill has appealed.

It seems doubtful that the settlement announced yesterday delivered much, if any, money to Dr. Hatfill. Judge Hilton's decision could have undermined the case against Vanity Fair and Reader's Digest, which was already in some difficulty. Last year, the lawyers representing the scientist in the Times case and another case against the federal government withdrew from the case against the two magazines. Even before those blows, the case against the magazines was probably of less value than those against the Times and the government because Mr. Foster's article did not appear until after Mr. Hatfill's reputation was already damaged by press accounts and the Justice Department's identification of him as a "person of interest" in the probe.

Dr. Hatfill's suit against Vanity Fair, Reader's Digest, and Mr. Foster was filed in Virginia in August 2004, and later transferred to New York at the request of the publications. Mr. Foster's employer, Vassar, was named as a defendant early in the litigation but was subsequently dismissed from the case.