The conflict between Hens Niemann and Magnus Carlsen is not new. A fellow chess player, Niemann, sued five-time world champion Carlsen for $100 million after the former withdrew from the Sinquefield Cup in September and implied that he was a cheater. Following this, Niemann filed a lawsuit against the experienced player, Chess.com, and others (for libel, slander, an unlawful boycott, and tortious interference with Niemann’s business), and Carlsen even stated that he won’t play against Niemann going forward.
The legal dispute between Carlsen and Niemann has now become murkier after the latter claimed that Carlsen had paid another grandmaster, Aryan Tari, to yell “Ukse Hans,” which translates to “Cheater Hans,” during the European Club Cup closing ceremony on October 9, 2022.
The latest submission was made to the district court of Missouri
The latest submission to the district court of Missouri states, “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.”
“In Carlsen’s malicious defamatory campaign against Niemann, Carlsen went as far as paying Aryan Tari €300 to scream ‘Ukse [sic] Hans’, Norwegian for ‘Cheater Hans’, from the stands at the closing ceremony of the European Club Cup on October 9, 2022, which was attended by many of the world’s most prominent chess players and heard by many of its fans.”
It further adds, “Shortly thereafter, the entire Norwegian chess team, including Carlsen, were observed publicly chanting ‘Ukse [sic] Hans’ in bars and the streets of the Austrian town where the European Club Cup was held. Any reasonable listener of these statements would interpret them as reiterating Carlsen’s false accusation that Niemann cheated when he defeated Carlsen at the Sinquefield Cup.”
The Carlsen-Niemann controversy has darkened further with the latest accusation
The fresh charge from the 19-year-old has so added more darkness to the Carlsen-Niemann issue. He had previously been accused of cheating by Carlsen and Chess.com, to which the child had stated that he had done it twice, at the ages of 12 and 16, but not since. It will be intriguing to see how Chess.com and Carlsen react to Niemann’s most recent accusations.