Jury Verdict: NYTimes Not Liable In Palin Defamation Case

A federal jury in Manhattan delivered a verdict in favor of The New York Times, finding the newspaper not liable for allegedly defaming former Alaska Governor and 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin in a 2017 editorial on gun control. 

The decision, reached after approximately two hours of deliberation following a weeklong retrial, marks Palin’s second defeat in her legal battle against the Times. The case, which stems from a June 14, 2017, editorial that inaccurately linked Palin to a 2011 mass shooting.

The retrial, held in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, concluded with the jury rejecting Palin’s claim that the Times defamed her. The weeklong proceeding revisited the 2017 editorial “America’s Lethal Politics,” which Palin argued falsely suggested she incited a January 2011 mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona, that killed six people and severely injured Democratic U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords.

The disputed editorial, published on June 14, 2017, was written in response to a shooting targeting Republican lawmakers at a baseball practice. Former Times editorial page editor James Bennet added language suggesting a link between the 2011 Tucson shooting and a map circulated by Palin’s political action committee, SarahPAC, which placed crosshairs over Giffords’s district and others. The map, intended to target Democrats politically, was misconstrued as inciting violence.

The Times acknowledged the mistake within 14 hours, issuing an online correction and a print apology stating there was “no established link” between Palin’s map and the Tucson shooting. However, Palin’s legal team argued the correction was insufficient, as it did not explicitly name her, allowing the alleged defamation to persist.

Palin’s Claims: Palin, 61, who served as Alaska’s governor from 2006 to 2009 and ran alongside Senator John McCain in the 2008 presidential election, contended that the editorial damaged her reputation by falsely portraying her as responsible for the tragedy.