The saga of a paper purporting to find that prayer doubles the success rate of fertility treatment continues. A Los Angeles Superior Court judge has reinstated a defamation lawsuit that he tossed out two months ago against a professor at the University of California at Irvine who has been the study’s main debunker.

The lawsuit says that Bruce L. Flamm, a volunteer clinical professor at Irvine, defamed one of the authors of the prayer study, Kwang Y. Cha, a fertility expert, in a commentary in a medical newspaper. The legal wrangling comes after charges of fraud and plagiarism hit two of the paper’s authors, and the third dissociated himself from it. —Lila Guterman