Sarah Palin wins new trial in New York Times libel case

By Jonathan Stamp

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Sarah Palin won a new lawsuit against The New York Times on Wednesday over an editorial the former Alaska governor called defamatory.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Palin could try again to prove that the Times should be held liable for a 2017 editorial that falsely linked her to a mass murder six years earlier that left six people dead and Democratic U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords seriously injured.

Palin's lawyers argued that U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff, who presided over the February 2022 trial, improperly excluded evidence of the Times' actual malice and wrongly instructed jurors to disregard some of that evidence.

Media critics and Palin herself see the case as an opportunity to overturn the US Supreme Court's landmark 1964 ruling, New York Times vs. Sullivan. The ruling set a very high bar for proving defamation by public figures.

To win, public figures must prove that the media showed “actual malice,” meaning that they knowingly published false information or recklessly disregarded the truth.

Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch urged a review of the Sullivan decision, with Gorsuch citing changes in the media landscape, including the growth of cable and online news and the spread of misinformation.

The Times editorial, titled “America's Lethal Politics,” addressed gun control and lamented the rise of inflammatory political rhetoric.

It was released on June 14, 2017, after a gunman opened fire at a congressional baseball team practice in Alexandria, Virginia, wounding Republican U.S. Congressman Steve Scalise and others.

The editorial pointed out that Palin's political action committee had published a map with crosshairs over Giffords' district before the 2011 shooting in Tucson, Arizona, in which Giffords was injured.

Palin objected to the editorial, saying that “the connection to political incitement was clear,” although there was no evidence that the card was the motive for Jared Lee Loughner, the Arizona shooter.

James Bennet, then the newspaper's editorial page editor, had added the controversial phrase. The Times corrected the editorial the next morning after readers and a columnist complained. Bennet was a defendant in Palin's case.

Palin, 60, Republican US vice presidential candidate in 2008 and governor of Alaska from 2006 to 2009, expressed the case in biblical terms: She sees herself as an outsider compared to the Goliath of the Times.

The Times' lawyers argued that neither the newspaper nor Bennet intended to link Palin to the Arizona shooting.

Rakoff added a new facet to the case by deciding during jury deliberations that he would dismiss Palin's case because she had failed to present clear and convincing evidence of the Times' malice.

Some jurors learned of Rakoff's crime through news alerts on their cell phones. They said it had no impact on their deliberations, which continued for several more hours.

The case is Palin v. New York Times et al, 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 22-558.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York)