Vengeance Is Ours (2008)
On April 21, 2009, Henep Isum Mandingo and Hup Daniel Wemp of Papua New Guinea filed a $10 million USD defamation lawsuit against Diamond over a 2008 New Yorker magazine article entitled "Vengeance Is Ours: What Can Tribal Societies Tell Us About Our Need to Get Even?" Mandingo and Wemp claimed the article, an account of feuds and vengeance killings in the New Guinea highlands, misrepresented and embellished their involvement in inter-tribal violence. The lawsuit came after Rhonda Roland Shearer alleged that the New Yorker article contained factual inaccuracies – most notably that Mandingo was fit and healthy, not, as claimed by Diamond, wheelchair-bound after being injured in fighting.
Diamond and the New Yorker both stood by the article, maintaining that it was a faithful account of the story related to Diamond by Wemp while they worked together in 2001 and again in a formal interview in 2006. They said that the article was based on "detailed notes", that both Diamond and the magazine did all they reasonably could to verify the story, and that in a recorded phone interview conducted in August 2008 by Chris Jennings, a fact checker for the New Yorker, Wemp did not raise any significant objections. Wemp contends he told Jennings the story was "inaccurate, inaccurate". According to anthropologist Pauline Wiessner, an expert on tribal warfare in Papua New Guinea, young men often exaggerate or make up entirely their exploits in tribal warfare; she stated that Diamond would have been naïve to accept Wemp's stories at face value.
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