On April 10, 2024, in Manhattan, federal judge John P. Cronan delivered the verdict in my defamation lawsuit against Channel One Russia, a key pillar in President Putin’s propaganda machine. The judgment awarded me $25 million in damages for their baseless accusation that I poisoned my dear friend Alexander “Sasha” Litvinenko, using the radioactive element polonium, and further alleging that I murdered my own wife, Svetlana, as a means of concealing my involvement.
On November 23, 2006, I had stood outside the London hospital where Sasha had just died and read out a letter he had written: “You, Mr. Putin, managed to silence one man, but in doing so you have shown your barbarism and cruelty to the whole world.” On that day, Sasha’s widow, Marina, the oligarch Boris Berezovsky, whom Sasha was closely aligned with, and I took on a solemn mission to convince the world that Sasha was right in naming Putin as his killer.
But an alternative narrative was spreading across the globe at the same time. Responding to my reading of Sasha’s letter, Putin mocked its authenticity: “This note was made public after his death. The people who did this are not God, and Mr. Litvinenko is no Lazarus.” Following Putin’s lead, Russian state media began accusing Boris and me of fabricating the letter, purportedly to malign the Russian president.
Russian television shows accused Boris and me of working for the British and U.S. spy agencies, while Marina faced mounting tension with the British government, which was hesitant to pursue an in-depth investigation into her husband’s death, fearful of complicating relations with Putin.
When Prime Minister David Cameron warmly received Putin at the London 2012 Olympics, Marina’s patience ran out and she sued Her Majesty’s Government, demanding a full investigation. It led to a public inquiry where an English judge concluded that Sasha had been poisoned by two Russian operatives, Andrey Lugovoy and Dmitry Kovtun, an act that was likely sanctioned by Putin himself.
Following the announcement of the inquiry’s findings, in the spring of 2015, we felt a sense of resolution: we had won the information war despite the death of Boris by suicide, in 2013. However, our sense of closure was premature.
A Father’s Accusation
On March 20, 2018, an unexpected call from a friend in Moscow plunged me back into a familiar turmoil. “They’ve just said on Channel One that you poisoned Litvinenko and spread polonium all over London, and that you also killed Svetlana,” he said.
I owed this new attention to the Salisbury poisonings three weeks earlier in which Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer, and his daughter, Yulia, were severely injured by a Novichok nerve agent at their English home. The assassination attempt, via a poisoned door handle, led the British government to point fingers at Russia, drawing parallels to the Litvinenko case (in which tea had been laced with polonium). Russian media responded with a propaganda offensive, blaming the Skripals’ and Litvinenko’s poisonings on Western intelligence agencies.
“You have shown your barbarism and cruelty to the whole world.”
Shockingly, my accuser on the Channel One chat show Let Them Talk was Walter Litvinenko, Sasha’s aging father. He told the stunned audience how he came to London to see his dying son, how he met Svetlana at the hospital, and how she tearfully confessed that it was I who had poisoned Sasha. Walter went on to claim that Svetlana had died a month later at the age of 28, suggesting that I had silenced her. As Walter spoke, my image appeared on the screens of millions of Russian viewers.
“Walter has always been a scoundrel, particularly towards Sasha,” Marina had told me. “He left him during his childhood and only reconnected when Sasha had the means to support him financially.” Marina and Svetlana had been close friends. Contrary to Walter’s assertion, Svetlana was 55 when she succumbed to cancer, three and a half years after Sasha’s passing
Walter’s outlandish assertions, though completely absurd to us, were echoed on every Russian network, including the international RT propaganda channel. For the public, this was a bombshell: “Litvinenko’s father names his son’s killer.” RT did not respond to AIR MAIL’s request for comment.
The collective reach of state-controlled media in Russia and abroad extends to hundreds of millions of viewers. Amid this whirlwind, friends reached out from every corner, assuring me they did not believe a word of what was said on TV. And two F.B.I. agents showed up at my door in New York to tell me that the bureau considered me a potential target for malevolent forces due to the heightened media attention in Russia.
Despite calling the U.S. my home for almost five decades, my engagement with human rights in Russia stretches back even further, rooted in my early years as a Soviet dissident in Moscow.
But after witnessing the harrowing radioactive demise of my friend, my dispute with Putin took on a profoundly personal dimension. The narrative had now evolved to the point where it presented a stark, binary question: either Putin was the killer or I was. How could I stand by and allow him to have the final word? As a true American, I saw no better recourse than going to court.
Fighting for Truth
My attorney Randy Sellier laid out the complexities involved in pursuing legal action in an American court. The first hurdle was jurisdictional: we needed to demonstrate that the contentious program had been produced, at least in part, within New York State. Secondly, we faced the challenge posed by the First Amendment, which guarantees free speech.
“Ironic, isn’t it?,” I remarked, “that Putin, having effectively quashed free speech back home, might seek refuge in the First Amendment here.”
“To bypass the First Amendment’s shield, we must establish ‘actual malice,’” said Rodney Smolla, my other attorney. This means proving the network was aware they were propagating falsehoods. It’s often the toughest part of media litigation.
Then there was the daunting aspect of financing the lawsuit. “My guess is that the defendants will make every possible argument, and every possible motion, to try to get your case thrown out, and the costs will mount up quickly,” Randy candidly stated. And he was right, as the lengthy court docket shows.
I had no money, so I resorted to crowd-funding on GoFundMe and Facebook, with Marina’s endorsement. Fortuitously, around 300 supporters, primarily Russian expatriates as well as two oligarchs in exile, stepped in to cover the initial costs. But when Putin invaded Ukraine, donations for everything not related to the war dried up. Despite this, Randy and Rod continued to work, now for free.
Securing jurisdiction proved relatively straightforward, due to the fact that Channel One’s New York correspondent had interviewed me for the program, even though the footage never made it to air. However, the challenge of proving actual malice was significantly more daunting. How could we convincingly argue that the creators of the program were aware of my innocence when Walter had publicly accused me?
Either Putin was the killer or I was.
The breakthrough occurred at the deposition, where Randy showcased his legal acumen against Dmitry Borisov, the host of Let Them Talk. Randy began by acknowledging Borisov’s professionalism and diligence as a journalist, setting a complimentary tone before probing why he chose to give credence to Walter’s dubious claims.
Borisov’s response was telling: “His allegations sounded so strange and unfounded, that in my opinion they did not require looking into.” Judge Cronan interpreted this remark as “direct evidence … that Channel One broadcast the accusations concerning Goldfarb despite serious doubts as to their truth.” This amounted to actual malice. Channel One did not respond to AIR MAIL’s request for comment.
Judgment Day
As I listened to the judge pronounce my $25 million award, a torrent of mixed emotions washed over me. On one side, there was a sense of triumph—I had bested Putin. Yet, on the flip side, I might never actually receive any of this money. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Channel One came under U.S. and European sanctions. It probably has no assets in the West that I could claim. Was the game worth the trouble? Six years of navigating the complexities of the court system, the tireless dedication of my legal team, hundreds of pages of legal briefs?
Sasha and Boris are gone, while Putin has built a brutal dictatorship and is unleashing devastation on Ukrainian cities. Putin is seven years my junior. The likelihood of my outliving him seems slim.
Amid these somber reflections, my thoughts drifted to Patriots, Peter Morgan’s West End import currently running on Broadway, which dramatizes the relationship between Putin and Berezovsky. Watching the premiere in London, I was profoundly moved by the final act, where Sasha posthumously visits Boris as a perfectly Shakespearean ghost, just as Boris is about to take his own life.
The specter tells Boris, “In heaven, Russian dissidents rise in respect when I enter.”
Imagining my legal battle with Channel One as the concluding act of this saga, I find myself yearning for a visit from Sasha’s specter, too. In this imagined epilogue, perhaps he’d say, “Forget about the money, old friend. Know that up here, in the celestial realms, your victory resonates deeply.”
Alex Goldfarb is the co-author, jointly with Marina Litvinenko, of Death of a Dissident: The Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and the Return of the KGB