Sarah Palin Granted New Trial in Times Defamation Suit
NEW YORK — Former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin is entitled to a new trial in her defamation suit against The New York Times due to a series of errors by the judge handling the case, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday.
Palin sued the Times in 2017, alleging the newspaper defamed her in an editorial about gun violence and political rhetoric.
The editorial, entitled “America’s Lethal Politics” and published under the byline of the Times editorial board, referenced a 2011 shooting that killed six people and wounded then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., and suggested that an ad circulated by Palin’s political action committee had incited the gunman to carry out the shooting spree.
The following day the Times printed a correction that admitted that “in fact, no such link was established.”
It went on to say, “The editorial also incorrectly described a map distributed by a political action committee before that shooting. It depicted electoral districts, not individual Democratic lawmakers, beneath stylized cross hairs.”
The newspaper also posted an apology to its readers on social media.
But Palin said those efforts to correct the record were insufficient to the damage done to her reputation.
The case went to trial in 2022, and the jury ultimately sided with the Times, but in a wholly unexpected move, U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff issued a ruling during deliberations announcing he planned to dismiss the case after the verdict.
Rakoff explained he was making the unusual move because he believed Palin “wholly failed to prove her case even to the minimum standard required by law.”
On Wednesday, the 2nd Circuit said Rakoff’s announcement “improperly intruded on the province of the jury by making credibility determinations, weighing evidence and ignoring facts or inferences that a reasonable juror could plausibly have found to support Palin’s case.”
In ordering that a new trial be held on Palin’s claims, the three-judge panel also cited a number of other errors by the veteran jurist, including the erroneous exclusion of evidence that called the reliability of any jury verdict into question.
Dan can be reached at [email protected] and at https://twitter.com/DanMcCue
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