Dhe US billionaire and investor Bill Ackman wants to sue Springer Verlag. He announced this on the X platform (formerly Twitter). “Now that Business Insider and Axel Springer have tripled their false claims and slanders” and reinforced their “revelations,” for which he is very grateful, he will respond with a lawsuit, Ackman wrote. This will take a few weeks. Until then, “out of respect for the truth, no judgment should be made.”
The Springer-owned portal “Business Insider” had reported plagiarism in the doctoral thesis of Bill Ackman’s wife Neri Oxman, a designer and former professor at the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Oxman had admitted the passages (including a copy from Wikipedia), apologized and pointed out that all sources were mentioned in the bibliography of her work. Ackman had described the Business Insider reports as defamatory, anti-Semitic and as revenge against himself based on his family. His wife is Jewish and grew up in Israel. He recently ran a campaign to oust Harvard President Claudine Gay, who had made very cautious comments about anti-Semitism on the university's campus. She resigned after allegations of plagiarism.
Springer had initiated an internal investigation into the research on Neri Oxman. “Business Insider” also did this, with the result that the story was okay. The managing director of “Business Insider”, Barbara Peng, writes in an internal memo from which the “Financial Times” quotes that there was no “unfair prejudice” in the story, nor was there any personal, political or religious motivation behind it Tracking history played a role. The reporting is accurate and fair. They obey high journalistic standards and are committed to truth and fairness. The timing of the story was also right. Springer-Verlag confirmed to the Financial Times that the memo was correct. We stand by “Business Insider” and the editorial team.
Ackman's criticism caused severe turbulence at Springer. The investor not only addressed the editorial team of “Business Insider”, he also called out Springer’s major shareholder KKR and asked why the investment company Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. was involved in a company that acted so “unethically”. Ackman's attack is poison for Springer's ambitions in the American media market, where the company wants to continue to grow. This is probably why the two articles in “Business Insider” about Neri Oxman caused alarm. The editorial team of “Business Insider,” in turn, viewed the fact that the genesis of the two articles about Neri Oxman should be re-examined as an interference with their journalistic sovereignty.
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