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LONDON — A few days before emerging victorious from a libel lawsuit, Deborah Lipstadt was at her home in Atlanta, preparing for Passover.

Not coincidentally, she borrowed from the Haggadah in summing up the significance of the legal ordeal she has endured.

"If, in the future," Lipstadt declared, "I can use this experience to teach and to write more history, then, in the spirit of the approaching holiday, dayenu — it will be enough for me."

The day after she made that statement, a British judge ruled that David Irving failed to prove his reputation had been damaged by Lipstadt and her publisher in a book that branded him a Holocaust denier.

While she had set out in her book, "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory," to demolish Holocaust revisionism, Lipstadt said she was not looking for a fight.

"But once it came within the parameters of my life, there was only one way I knew how to respond — and that was to fight back," she said in an interview in London a day before the verdict was read.

She had just arrived back in Britain from Atlanta, where she is a professor at Emory University. During her 10-day stay at home, some of her time was spent cleaning for Passover and preparing for the annual influx of family for her second seder.

In the interview, she said she did not seek a court battle that would overwhelm her professional and personal life.

"I never would have gone into court with these people — I don't think it's productive," she said. "But once they came after me, I had no option but to fight with all my strength and with all my might."

Her only regret was that Holocaust survivors who had attended the trial were compelled to endure Irving's courtroom taunts.

She came close to tears when she recalled being "enveloped by survivors" who had approached her during the hearings to thank her for her stand against Irving.

Caught in the spotlight of a case that attracted standing-room-only public galleries and the constant glare of international media attention, Lipstadt maintained an internal tranquility by methodically ordering her time.

Days were spent in the courtroom, evenings at her apartment in London's West End.

"I'd come back to my apartment and generally change into exercise clothes. Sometimes I'd go and work out, then I'd answer e-mails, read transcripts, go over material that was going to be covered next day in the case.

"In the early part of the evening would come calls from every place east of here — friends in Europe and Israel. Later would come calls from west of here. Then I would go to sleep. It was all very routine."

There were few emotional roller coasters, but she admitted that "a couple of times, when real ugliness came out in the court, it was revolting. I just wanted to go home and take a shower."

What kept her strong was what she described as her "A-Team" of lawyers, legal assistants, researchers and experts.

She described the flood of e-mails, letters, notes, cards and phone calls she received from well-wishers around the world. But most moving and most touching was "the recognition by so many people — again, Jews and non-Jews — that while I was the person on the front line this was not my struggle alone; that it really was a struggle for truth, for memory, for doing the right thing."

Her contempt for Irving was boundless: "He is a liar and he is a bully," she said almost matter-of-factly.

"To manipulate the historical record in such a contemptuous fashion and to take what appeared to me to be such glee in making fun of survivors — that was debilitating. But the effect was to make me even more convinced I was doing the right thing."

Did she now regret anything in the book? "Yes," she said. "I regret that I didn't know then what I know now, because then I would have been much more severe in what I wrote about Irving."