Ackman hires law firm to battle Business Insider

Billionaire investor Bill Ackman escalated his offensive against Business Insider in relation to stories alleging his wife committed plagiarism, deploying a law firm to increase pressure on the news outlet to correct or retract them, reports Bob Van Voris and Amanda Gordon of Bloomberg News.

Van Voris and Gordon report, “‘We are providing you this demand to explain why immediate retractions and corrections are necessary, supported by undisputed facts and a timeline over the last two months, in a final attempt to avoid litigation,’ an attorney for Ackman’s wife said in a 77-page letter, which Ackman shared Friday.

“Ackman has accused Business Insider of a ‘campaign to destroy’ the reputation of his wife, Neri Oxman, after the news outlet published stories saying that the former professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had plagiarized parts of her doctoral dissertation.

“The Business Insider pieces on Oxman were published in the wake of Ackman’s campaign against former Harvard University President Claudine Gay, who resigned Jan. 2 after accusations of plagiarism in her own work and criticism of her response to antisemitism on campus.”

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Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.