A federal appeals court on Wednesday ordered a new trial in a long-running and closely watched libel lawsuit that Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and Republican vice-presidential nominee, brought against The New York Times.
The court found that Ms. Palin’s original trial against The Times, which she lost in 2022, had been tainted by problematic rulings by the presiding judge.
The suit, which Ms. Palin first filed in 2017, accused The Times of defaming her in an editorial that wrongly suggested that she had incited a 2011 shooting at a political event in Arizona. Ms. Palin said that the editorial had damaged her reputation, even though The Times had swiftly corrected and apologized for the piece.
A federal jury in New York City ruled for The Times. Ms. Palin appealed, arguing in part that the judge hearing the case had wrongly excluded evidence. She also argued that the jury may have been swayed by announcing that he planned to throw out the lawsuit even as the jury was continuing to deliberate.
The three-judge appeals panel in New York sided with Ms. Palin, saying that the trial judge, Jed S. Rakoff, had made a number of errors that “impugn the reliability” of the verdict. The appeals court called for a new trial.
“This decision is disappointing,” Charlie Stadtlander, a spokesman for The Times, said. “We’re confident we will prevail in a retrial.”
As a politician, Ms. Palin often made media-bashing part of her rhetoric. Her lawsuit — as well as the 10-day trial in February 2022 — put her toe-to-toe with one of the country’s most prominent mainstream news organizations.
The case was also freighted with extra significance because Ms. Palin’s lawyers hoped to use it as a vehicle to overturn the Supreme Court’s landmark First Amendment decision in New York Times v. Sullivan. That 1964 ruling, as well as a handful of subsequent cases, has made it much harder for public figures like Ms. Palin to win libel lawsuits.
While many view the Sullivan decision as a linchpin of the free press, a growing chorus of mostly conservative critics, including Justice Clarence Thomas, have argued in recent years that the precedent unfairly shields news organizations from accountability when they harm people’s reputations.
The appeals court’s 56-page ruling on Wednesday did not engage with the argument by Ms. Palin’s side that the Sullivan precedent was obsolete. Instead, the three judges — all appointed by Republican presidents — faulted Judge Rakoff’s handling of the trial. (In 2019, the same appeals court reversed his decision to dismiss the lawsuit before trial.)
Among other things, the appeals panel said that Judge Rakoff improperly prevented jurors from hearing evidence that might have shown that James Bennet, who at the time oversaw The Times editorial board and edited the piece in question, knew or should have known that Ms. Palin did not incite the 2011 shooting in Tucson, Ariz.
That rampage, which left six people dead and gravely wounded a Democratic congresswoman, Gabby Giffords, came after Ms. Palin’s political action committee published a map with cross hairs over several Democrat-controlled congressional districts, including Ms. Giffords’s. The gunman, Jared Lee Loughner, was later found to have severe mental illness, and no evidence emerged that he had been motivated by politics.
Mr. Bennet’s state of mind matters because under the Sullivan precedent, a public figure can only prevail in a libel lawsuit if she proves that a publisher acted with “actual malice,” meaning that the publisher knew that what was written was false or acted with reckless disregard about the statement’s accuracy.
Mr. Bennet, who left The Times in 2020, said at the trial that he had not intended to convey in the editorial that the map had caused the shooting.
The appeals court concluded that Judge Rakoff can preside over the retrial. “We are confident that the district judge will adhere to the principle of complete impartiality, and its appearance, in fulfilling his future judicial responsibilities in this case,” the three judges wrote.
Ms. Palin’s lawyer, Shane Vogt, said he was reviewing Wednesday’s decision.
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