From [HERE] Along with a series of publications which want to dismiss defamation litigation from a University of Pennsylvania anthropologist, who claimed their allegedly defamatory reports of her supposed mishandling of the remains of victims from the MOVE Bombing of 1985 damaged her professional reputation and caused her to suffer harassment and death threats, the University is looking to do likewise.

Dr. Janet Monge initially filed suit in the Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas on May 20 versus the University of Pennsylvania; UPenn officials Amy Gutmann, Wendell Pritchett, Kathleen Morrison, Deborah Thomas, Christopher Woods and Paul Mitchell, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Billy Penn, The New Yorker, ESPN, The Guardian, The Daily Mail, Slate, The New York Post, Teen Vogue, Hyperallergic Media, Smithsonian Magazine, Al-Dia News and The New York Times, in addition to each of the reporters who authored stories on the events in question for those publications, plus the Association of Black Anthropologists and the Society of Black Archaeologists.

The case was removed to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on July 27.

MOVE Bombing & Victims’ Remains Background

On May 13, 1985, the Philadelphia Police Department firebombed a West Philadelphia house on Osage Avenue occupied by MOVE, a Black liberation organization. The resulting explosion and fire killed 11 people, including five children, and left more than 250 people homeless.

In the wake of the bombing, the children’s bones were given to then-UPenn anthropologist Dr. Alan Mann and the plaintiff, Monge, then a graduate student, for them to examine and attempt to identify, but they were unable to do so. However, the children’s remains were neither identified nor returned to the City at that time.

Instead, Mann stored the remains in his office at the Penn Museum until he retired in 2001 and joined the faculty at Princeton University. Mann left the remains with Monge, who then stored them in her office and in the Physical Anthropology Lab at the Penn Museum for the next 20 years. During this period of time, Monge showed the remains to different individuals and groups on at least 10 occasions, before using them in a demonstrative exhibit for an online video course at Princeton in 2019.

In early 2021, both UPenn and the City of Philadelphia began investigations into the mishandling of the children’s bodies, after it became known that the official order for cremation of the remains was never carried out. That cremation order was given in 2017 by Thomas Farley, the City’s now-former Department of Health Commissioner, without the permission of their family. The City later fired Farley.

During this time, the City Medical Examiner’s Office admitted that it had remains of two of the five children killed in the MOVE Bombing, who were later identified as Katricia and Zanetta Dotson.

An internal report commissioned by UPenn found that “Mann’s retention of the remains from 1985 to 2001 after he was unable to identify them, and his failure to return them to the Medical Examiner’s Office, demonstrated extremely poor judgment, and a gross insensitivity to the human dignity as well as the social and political implications of his conduct.”

The report also found likewise, that “Monge’s retention of the remains from 2001 to 2021 and their use in the Princeton Online video course demonstrated, at a minimum, extremely poor judgment and gross insensitivity to the human dignity and social and political implications of her conduct.” [MORE]