Irving's reputation as a historian was discredited in 1996 when, in the course of an unsuccessful libel case he filed against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books, he was proven to have deliberately misrepresented historical evidence to promote Holocaust denial and whitewash the Nazis. The English court found that Irving was an active Holocaust denier, antisemite and racist, who "for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence". In addition, the court found that Irving's books had distorted the history of Hitler's role in the Holocaust to depict Hitler in a favourable light.