Properness of the bending map

Abstract: The bending map of a hyperbolic 3-manifold with boundary maps a geometrically hyperbolic metric to its bending measured geodesic lamination. We show that the bending map is proper. As a byproduct of the proof we show that the group of isotopy classes of homeomorphisms of M acts properly discontinuously on the set of doubly incompressible measured geodesic laminations.