The New York Times found not liable in Sarah Palin defamation trial

Sarah Palin was not defamed by The New York Times, a Manhattan jury found Tuesday after the former Alaska governor claimed she was smeared by a 2017 editorial linking her to mass shootings.

The nine-person jury deliberated in Manhattan federal court for two hours before finding that the Grey Lady did not libel the onetime Republican vice presidential candidate.

Palin, 61, was visibly dejected upon hearing the verdict, which followed a nearly two-week civil trial.

5

She testified on Monday that she’d been hit with death threats following the publication of the opinion piece that claimed her campaign rhetoric inspired an assassination attempt on Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords six years earlier.

“It just kicks the oomph right out of ya,” she told the court.

The Times, which corrected the editorial the day after it ran, argued that Palin’s lawyers had not met the high bar of “actual malice” needed to find media outlets liable for defamation.

Times editorial director James Bennet — who tearfully apologized to Palin in his trial testimony — walked over to her as she stood up to leave, but she appeared to brush him aside, strolling past him on her way out of the courtroom.

Outside, a glum Palin flashed a half-smile and said she was looking forward to going back to her home in Alaska.

5

“I get to go home to a beautiful family of five kids and grandkids, to a beautiful property, and get on with life, and that’s nice,” she told reporters before getting into a black SUV.

Her lawyer, Ken Turkel, said they were considering options to appeal the verdict.

Turkel said during closing arguments that the jury should find the paper liable for defamation because Bennet knew the opinion piece was inaccurate and had acted with “reckless disregard” for the truth.

He asked them to award his client compensatory damages for the harm to her reputation and for the emotional turmoil it caused her. 

5

“Find a number and let her get some closure to this thing,” Turkel said. “To this day, there has been no accountability. That’s why we’re here.”

But Felicia Ellsworth, an attorney for the Times, said in her closing that there was not “one shred of evidence showing anything other than an honest mistake.”

“We want to thank the jurors for their careful deliberations,” Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha said in a statement after the verdict.

“The decision reaffirms an important tenet of American law: publishers are not liable for honest mistakes.”

5

The editorial piece at the center of the case was published under the headline “America’s Lethal Politics” on June 14, 2017 and was about gun control in the wake of a 2017 shooting that wounded Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise.

The piece suggested Palin’s campaign rhetoric added to an environment of violence in the lead up to the 2011 mass shooting in Arizona that killed six and severely wounded Giffords.

The piece pointed out the fact that Palin’s political action committee had put out a map with crosshairs over Giffords’ election district days before the shooting. 

5

There is no evidence that convicted shooter Jared Lee Loughner was motivated by the map and the Times corrected the editorial less than 14 hours after it came out.

In its correction, the Times said the op-ed had “incorrectly stated that a link existed between political rhetoric and the 2011 shooting” and “incorrectly described” the map.

The verdict came after a 2022 trial in the same case also resulted in a jury returning a verdict in favor of the newspaper.

Judge Jed Rakoff had already thrown Palin’s case out while the deliberations were ongoing, finding that she failed to reach the stringent legal requirement in proving libel cases.

An appeals court in August ultimately sent the case back for a new trial, finding Rakoff made a bad call by keeping certain evidence favorable toward Palin from the jury.

Palin, who also testified at the first trial, told jurors Monday that the editorial harmed her reputation by drawing a “clear link” between the shooting and her campaign material. 

“This was the game changer. This was the attack on my reputation that created a helpless feeling,” she said.

With Post wires