One of the more important lawsuits of which I'm aware was when David Irving sued Deborah Lipstadt for publicly calling him a "liar" in regard to his denial of the Holocaust.
The UK has different rules when it comes to defamation than the US. One is that, in the UK, the burden of proof is on the defendant in defamation cases rather than the plaintiff.
Lipstadt ultimately won and managed to publicly show that Irving was wrong about the Holocaust and she and her team exposed his anti-Semitism and fascistic beliefs. Still, the question remained as to whether or not he actually lied.
When we call people "liars" in our day to day lives, we're usually doing so entirely based on our assumptions about the person speaking. Lies are a lot harder to expose than falsehoods.
One of the more interesting things that has been pointed out in the discussions about alleged psychics and mediums is that a lot of these people actually start to believe their lies. Of course I believe that Sylvia Browne was lying until her dying day and there seems to be evidence to support that; still, I don't think any of that would hold up in court.
The power of self-deception can't be forgotten. It's one thing to deny that we've done something bad to other people. It's another when it comes to lying to ourselves in order to try to clear out our own conscience. During my last breakup, there were plenty of things that my ex said about me that were untrue and I probably did some of the same; but, I can't prove that she lied and it's entirely possible that I've at least bent to truth without even realizing it out of an attempt to make her seem more like the bad guy.
I was thinking about this in relation to the Jussie Smollett case. I'm not thinking about whether or not he was guilty of staging a hate crime and lying to police - he was; but, I'm not as confident that he lied on the stand.
His story that he told on the stand made no sense, of course. However, I don't think that it's impossible that he told himself that he was innocent enough times over the course of the year that he actually came to believe his own lies.
He's pretty clearly a narcissist and that's nothing that emerged in the last year. His outburst after being sentenced really did indicate some mental instability. I do think that he knowingly staged the attack because he thinks that the world does (or should) revolve around him, he thought he wouldn't be caught and everybody would just buy it (a lot of people did), and he figured that if he got caught anybody who mattered to him would still rally around him (he seems to have been mostly right). What's more, he justified the lie because he felt that he had earned it.
Still, when most of the world turned on him and he was facing real consequences and people were pointing out the damage that he caused to his own causes, I can see him spending a year telling himself that he is now and had always been the good guy in all of this.
Do I think that he lied on the stand - yes. I do think it's plausible that he managed to break his own mind enough to actually believe what he was saying.