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 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.
Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokeswoman for The Times, said in a statement: “The decision reaffirms an important tenet of American law: Publishers are not liable for honest mistakes.”
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 mass shooting in 2011 in Tucson, Ariz., which gravely injured Representative Gabrielle 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 language in which the shootings had occurred, but no evidence that the gunman in Tucson ever saw the map or was influenced by it has been found.
During the trial, Ms. Palin told the jury that the editorial had “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 published correction was insufficient because it did not name her or her political action committee.
James Bennet, who was in charge of The Times’s opinion section at the time, testified that he had been responsible for inserting the incorrect statement into the editorial in the process of rewriting a draft. He said he had made a mistake and acted quickly to rectify it when it was brought to his attention.
Ms. Palin’s lawyers sought to paint Mr. Bennet as having acted with reckless disregard for the truth, positing that he should have known that Ms. Palin had nothing to do with the mass shooting and that The Times was careless in letting the editorial be published.
Lawyers for The Times contended that Ms. Palin’s claim did not meet the high legal bar needed for a public figure to be defamed. They said Mr. Bennet had made an honest mistake that The Times had quickly corrected. And they pointed to Ms. Palin’s acknowledgment to the jury that she was not seeking any financial damages in the case.
Legal experts cautioned against reading too much into The Times’s victory. Ms. Palin’s case, they said, was hampered by the newspaper’s rapid correction and apology and the lack of financial damage.
“It really is a victory for the jury system as much as The Times, since it would have been easy for the jury to have found liability given the sloppy mistake in the article,” said George Freeman, executive director of the Media Law Resource Center and a former lawyer for The Times.
Ms. Palin’s lawyers have said they planned to use the case as a vehicle for challenging The New York Times Company v. Sullivan, a landmark Supreme Court decision in 1964 that made it difficult for public figures to sue for defamation. They must prove there was “actual malice,” meaning that publishers either knew a statement was false and published anyway or showed a reckless disregard for its accuracy.
Samantha S. Barbas, a law professor at the University of Iowa and the author of a book about the Sullivan case, “Actual Malice,” said Ms. Palin’s loss would “fuel the momentum to overturn the New York Times v. Sullivan standard as it applies to public figures” because it showed how hard it was for plaintiffs to clear the actual malice threshold.
Matthew Fernholz, a Wisconsin lawyer who has sued news organizations for defamation and has argued for overturning the Sullivan precedent, said The Times’s admission of its error would be a confession of liability in most civil cases.
“For a jury to find that Palin could not even establish liability demonstrates that the actual malice standard imposes a very high burden for plaintiffs in defamation cases,” he said.
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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