Sarah Palin Loses Once and for All in Her Fight Against The New York Times
The former Alaska governor filed a lawsuit over a June 14, 2017, Times article.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
A jury determined Tuesday that The New York Times did not libel Sarah Palin in a 2017 editorial that she claimed damaged her reputation.
The decision came after the jury deliberated for two hours at a Manhattan federal court civil trial, NBC News reported.
On Monday, the MAGA loyalist testified that the Times editorial, which happened to be about gun violence, resulted in a high volume of death threats at her expense and general hit to her spirits.
The op-ed argued that Palin’s political action committee is responsible for promoting political rhetoric that enabled an atmosphere of violence in the United States.
Palin, 61, filed a lawsuit against The New York Times and its former editorial page editor, James Bennet, over a June 14, 2017, article that implied she may have incited a mass shooting in an Arizona parking lot in January 2011.
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The attack left six people dead and seriously injured Democratic U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords.
The Times corrected the article less than 14 hours after it was published. In a correction, it confessed that the editorial had “incorrectly stated that a link existed between political rhetoric and the 2011 shooting” and that it had “incorrectly described” a map linking the two.
Bennet explained that he was facing a tight deadline when he included a reference in America’s Lethal Politics linking the attack to a map from Palin’s political action committee, which had placed Giffords and other Democrats under crosshairs.
The verdict delivered on Tuesday marks Palin’s second courtroom defeat in the case, following a previous ruling in favor of the Times that was overturned by a federal appeals court in 2022.
Kenneth Turkel, Palin’s attorney, urged the jury to find the newspaper of record liable for defamation, claiming that Bennet either knew what he was publishing was incorrect or he acted with “reckless disregard” for the truth.
“To this day, there been no accountability,” he said. “That’s why we’re here.”
In her closing argument, Times’ lawyer Felicia Ellsworth argued: “To win this case, Governor Palin needs to prove that the New York Times and James Bennet did not care about the truth. There has not been one shred of evidence showing anything other than an honest mistake,” Reuters reported.
Turkel maintained that the jury should grant Palin compensatory damages for the harm the story did to her reputation and mental health, saying they should “find a number and let her get some closure to this thing.”
“She doesn’t cry a lot,” Turkel said, speaking to his client’s demeanor. “It may have been to them an honest mistake. For her, it was a life changer.”
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