Strata: Milestones: The Passing of a Conspiracy Theorist

On June 22, 2013, the New York Times noted the passing of writer Michael Baigent at age 65. For the Times, he was notable because he and his partner Richard Leigh had sued Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code (80 million copies sold) for copyright infringement, claiming that Brown had stolen his ideas from a book of theirs. At the trial, Brown admitted to having read the Baigent and Leigh book, but the British High Court of Justice ruled that the similarities between the two books were insufficient to constitute copyright infringement. Baigent and Leigh were ordered to pay millions of dollars in legal fees; in Britain the loser is required to pay the legal fees of the winner.

Baigent’s obituary brought back other memories for me. He and Leigh had written a best-selling book on the Dead Sea Scrolls when the scrolls were still being held incommunicado by a small publication team of mostly Catholic priests.¹ The Baigent and Leigh book gained traction largely because it accused the Vatican of being behind the publication lag, supposedly fearing that the scrolls would undermine vital Christian doctrine.