But it also didn’t take long for Cherry, Young and UT to find themselves sucked into a public-records lawsuit filed by a local writer and vice president of the American Policy Center, a think thank founded by right-wing conspiracy theorist Tom DeWeese.

That lawsuit is now threatening to pit some of our society’s deepest values against each other in a Knox County courtroom, and there’s a good chance that, no matter the outcome, the case will have consequences for anyone interested in mitigating climate change or protecting the public’s right to know what their government is doing.

In her lawsuit against UT, Kathleen Marquardt claims that school officials have illegally refused to turn over emails that are clearly public records. UT officials, for their part, apparently believe the lawsuit is part of an effort to launch a smear campaign against Cherry and Young similar to those seen in “ClimateGate” or similar scandals 

While Cherry, Marquardt, UT officials and the lawyers representing them all have declined to be interviewed by Hellbender Press about the snowballing legal battle, the 219-page case file shows they have a lot to say, indeed.

The lawsuit has moved through Knox County Circuit Court at a glacial pace since it was filed in the summer of 2020, but it now seems that the players involved are finally gearing up for some kind of resolution.

The legal landslide can be said to have started on Dec. 2, 2019, when UT posted a statement on its website describing how Professor Cherry had serendipitously discovered a fascinating article in a discarded 1966 issue of the Mining Congress Journal, a coal industry trade publication.

“The journal contains a passage from James R. Garvey, who was president of Bituminous Coal Research Inc., a now-defunct coal mining and processing research organization, admitting he knew there was evidence that the combustion of fossil fuels was contributing to an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which was predicted to increase the earth’s temperature and result in vast changes in the planet’s climate,” according to the post by UT officials.

“It pretty well described a version of what we know today as climate change,” Cherry was quoted as saying. “Increases in average air temperatures, melting of polar ice caps, rising of sea levels. It’s all in there.”

At the time she wrote the story, Young was a part-time public relations employee of the university.

Only two days after the information was posted on the school’s website, Marquardt submitted a request to UT officials under the auspices of the Tennessee Public Records Act, according to court documents.

Marquardt, who lives in Knoxville, has published several books and numerous articles, sometimes collaborating with 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.”

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, DeWeese “has built a career of issuing scary warnings about Agenda 21, a completely voluntary United Nations set of principles for sustainable resource management. Where others see sensible environmental guidelines, DeWeese finds sinister land-grabbing socialist UN initiatives that threaten national sovereignty, private property rights and freedom ...”

In her request to UT, Marquardt sought to review several months of emails 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 emails, ultimately arguing that “a substantial body of common law supports the position that the presence of an email on a University server does not convert an otherwise personal email into a public record.”

Marquardt eventually hired attorney Kaitlyn Hutcherson (of the downtown Knoxville law firm Woolf, McClane, Bright, Allen & Carpenter, PLLC) to sue UT for the records.

In a letter sent to UT staff attorney Lela Young on the date the lawsuit was filed, Hutcherson argued that university officials were unfairly accusing her client of having improper designs on the e-mails in question.

“While you stated (in a recent phone call) that the only possible purpose of Ms. Marquardt’s request appears to be to harass Professor Cherry, or in the alternative, to chill his speech, we obviously disagree,” Hutcherson wrote. “Ms. Marquardt’s request seeks public records to which she is entitled to review.”

After an initial flurry of motions and subpoenas, the lawsuit seemed to slow to a crawl with the arrival of the COVID pandemic, which threw court systems across the nation into a state of chaos from which they have still not fully recovered.

A March 28 hearing, however, has finally been scheduled before Knox County Circuit Court Judge William T. Ailor, who may eventually have to make a legal ruling that could have repercussions for all Tennessee citizens (including journalists and academic researchers) who wish to know what their government is doing.

Media organizations like the Tennessee Press Association have often intervened in similar lawsuits when the public’s right to know has been challenged, but court records indicate that none have done so in this instance.

In the meantime, the only person involved in the lawsuit who has been willing to make a public statement at all is Young, who no longer works for UT.

Although Young hasn’t been sued directly, she is the target of a subpoena seeking information about the role UT played in researching or promoting her Huffington Post story.

In a brief written statement, Young argued that the legal skirmishing is a distraction from the main issue: the actions taken by a multi-billion dollar industry that threaten public health.

“I won’t speak about the pending lawsuit, but I will say that ‘Coal Knew, Too’ is not a story about me and it’s not a story about Chris Cherry,” Young said. 

“‘Coal Knew, Too’ is a story about the massive intentional deception by a sophisticated and well-funded political PR machine to sow doubt about climate science,” she said.

“The world now has enough archival evidence from Big Oil — and Big Coal — to prove it. ‘Coal Knew, Too’ is a story about how fossil fuel interests led a four-decade long campaign of climate denial that all but ensured global delay, inaction, and political chaos on the issue.”