UNITED STATES: On Wednesday, US teenager Hans Niemann claimed that world champion Magnus Carlsen had paid a fellow grandmaster €300 to shout “Cheater Hans” from a balcony during a tournament. This accusation gave the chess cheating scandal even another weird turn.
The claim is made in an updated legal filing by Niemann, who is suing Carlsen, Chess.com, and others for defamation, slander, and “unlawfully colluding to blacklist him from the profession to which he has dedicated his life” to recover $100 million in damages.
Niemann further asserts that Carlsen and his teammates further harmed his reputation by yelling “Jukse Hans”—”Cheater Hans” in Norwegian—at bars during the October European Team Championships in Austria. This is stated in his amended document to the District Court of Missouri.
After Niemann stunned the Norwegian grandmaster in an overall match at the Sinquefield Cup in September, the world champion implied that his opponent was cheating, sparking a wave of accusations back and forth. Then, the following week, Carlsen declined to participate in an online game against Niemann, choosing instead to step down.
Meanwhile, Niemann claims that Carlsen went to even greater measures to discredit him in his most recent submission.
“To ensure that he inflicted the maximum possible damage to Niemann and his career, Carlsen, in the days and weeks that followed the Sinquefield Cup, deployed a more covert defamatory campaign against Niemann, designed to bolster Carlsen’s more high-profile defamatory accusations within the chess community,” according to the submission to the district court of Missouri.
The Norwegian grandmaster and Chess.com both refute any misconduct. Chess.com published a report in the fall of last year claiming that Niemann had engaged in more online match fraud than he had admitted, and in December it filed a motion to dismiss Niemann’s complaint.
In its motion, it argued that Niemann’s allegations of a plot to depict himself as a cheater by an online chess company and other players were “plainly without merit” and could only be viewed as a “publicity stunt.”
Meanwhile, Carlsen’s attorney has referred to Niemann’s accusations as “nothing more than an attempt to deflect the blame onto others.”
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