Sarah Palin Loses Defamation Suit Retrial Against New York Times

Former Republican Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has lost her defamation suit retrial against the New York Times.

The federal jury ruled after just two hours of deliberation on Tuesday that the New York Times was not guilty of libel when it falsely linked her to a 2011 mass shooting in an editorial it published in 2017. Per Axios:

Throughout this trial and the original 2022 trial, the Times asserted that the inaccurate link made in the editorial was a mistake.

It issued a formal correction of the piece, titled “America’s Lethal Politics,” two days after it was originally published on June 14.

Palin and her legal team argued that the Times and its former editorial page editor James Bennet for libel used “actual malice” in publishing the editorial.

A New York Times spokesperson said in a statement that the jury’s ruling proves “publishers are not liable for honest mistakes.”

“We want to thank the jurors for their careful deliberations. The decision reaffirms an important tenet of American law: publishers are not liable for honest mistakes,” the spokesperson said.

As Breitbart News reported in February 2022, U.S. Judge Jed S. Rakoff, a Bill Clinton appointee to the federal bench in the Southern District of New York, dismissed the case even as jurors were still deliberating over the verdict:

Palin sued the Times over a 2017 editorial in which it said that she had inspired the 2011 mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona. Judge Rakoff initially dismissed the case, but it was revived by a federal appeals court. After the presentation of arguments in initial motions, Rakoff decided that Palin had enough evidence to allow the case to go to trial — a rarity in defamation suits by public figures against the media, since the standard of proving “actual malice” is usually too high for plaintiffs to clear.

Moreover, Rakoff sent the case to the jury after closing arguments last week. But on Monday, as NPR’s David Folkenflik reported, he had second thoughts, and said Palin failed to meet the “actual malice” standard because of the Times‘s correction, and then-editorial page editor James Bennet’s contrition.

The jury ruled against Palin at the time only after it learned of Rakoff’s decision to dismiss the case, which resulted in a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit — including two George W. Bush appointees and one Donald Trump appointee — ruling that Rakoff acted improperly and demanded a retrial.