A federal jury on Tuesday ruled against Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and Republican vice-presidential nominee, in her yearslong defamation lawsuit against The New York Times. The jury reached the verdict after two hours of deliberations.
Ms. Palin sued The Times in 2017 after the newspaper published — and then swiftly corrected and apologized for — an editorial that wrongly suggested that she had incited a deadly shooting in Arizona years earlier.
The case became a bellwether for battles over press freedoms and media bias in the Trump era, with Ms. Palin’s lawyers saying they hoped to use it to attack a decades-old Supreme Court precedent that makes it harder for public figures to sue news outlets for defamation.
This is the second time a federal jury has concluded that The Times was not liable for defaming Ms. Palin in its editorial. The case first went to trial in 2022, and both the jury and the judge ruled in favor of The Times. But last year, a federal appeals court invalidated those decisions, setting the stage for this month’s retrial.
It is unclear whether the verdict will be the end of the lawsuit’s eight-year run or whether Ms. Palin’s lawyers will again appeal.
Outside the court after the verdict, Ms. Palin said she was going to “go home to a beautiful family” and “get on with life.” She declined to say whether she would appeal the verdict.
“We haven’t talked about what we’ll do next legally,” she told reporters.
The Times did not immediately comment about the verdict.
The lawsuit stemmed from an editorial The Times published in June 2017 after a left-wing gunman’s attack on congressional Republicans at a baseball field in Virginia.
The editorial incorrectly drew a connection between a 2011 mass shooting, which gravely injured Representative Gabriel Giffords, and a map that Ms. Palin’s political action committee had created with rifle cross hairs over Democratic congressional districts, including Ms. Giffords’s. The 2017 editorial was trying to make a point about the atmosphere of overheated political rhetoric in which the shootings had occurred.
During the trial, Ms. Palin told the jury that the editorial “kicked the oomph” right out of her, damaging her reputation. She said it had ignited another round of criticism of her years after the map was first distributed.
She said that The Times had not personally apologized to her, and that she felt the correction issued was insufficient because it did not name her or her PAC.
Katie Robertson covers the media industry for The Times. Email: [email protected]
David Enrich is a deputy investigations editor for The Times. He writes about law and business.
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