Sarah Palin defamation case: Former Alaska governor gets new trial in lawsuit against New York Times

NEW YORK — A federal appeals court on Wednesday revived Sarah Palin’s defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, finding that several significant issues “call into question the reliability” of the original report.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit criticized the trial judge for dismissing the case before the jury had reached a verdict. The jury was allowed to continue deliberating before finally finding the newspaper not liable in February 2022.

“Unfortunately, several significant issues at trial — specifically, the erroneous exclusion of evidence, an inaccurate jury instruction, a legally erroneous answer to a jury question mid-deliberation, and the fact that jurors learned during deliberations of the district court’s Rule 50 dismissal decision — call into question the reliability of that verdict,” the opinion states.

Palin’s attorney, Shane Vogt, said in a statement: “Governor Palin is pleased with today’s decision, which is a significant step in holding publishers accountable for content that misleads readers and the general public. The truth deserves a level playing field, and Governor Palin looks forward to presenting her case to a jury that is ‘armed with the proper evidence and properly instructed in the law,’ as stated in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals’ opinion.”

Former Alaska Gov. Palin sued the Times and its former opinion editor, James Bennet, over an editorial published on June 14, 2017. The article, headlined “America’s Deadly Politics,” linked the 2011 shooting of former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords to a digital graphic of a cross over Democratic congressional districts published in March 2010 by Palin’s political action committee. No connection was ever made between the cross map and the shooting. Rather, at the time of the editorial, the attack was widely seen as a result of the shooter’s mental illness.

Palin’s original defamation suit was dismissed, but in 2019 the Second Circuit overturned the dismissal. The case went to trial in 2022. Judge Jed Rakoff granted the Times’ motion for a directed verdict days before the jury determined the paper was not liable for defaming Palin.

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In its opinion Wednesday, the appeals court agreed with Palin that Rakoff “erroneously dismissed or discredited her evidence of actual malice and improperly substituted his own judgment for that of the jury.”

The New York Times told ABC News in a statement Wednesday: “This decision is disappointing. We are confident that we will prevail in a new trial.”

Rakoff said at the time that he would set aside the verdict and dismiss the lawsuit because Palin had not met the high standard of showing that the Times had acted with “actual malice” when it published an editorial that wrongly linked Palin’s political action committee to a mass shooting.

Palin sued the Times in 2017, about nine years after she was chosen as Sen. John McCain’s Republican vice presidential nominee, alleging that the paper deliberately ruined her burgeoning career as a political commentator and consultant by publishing an inaccurate editorial that she said defamed her.

The editorial that prompted the lawsuit was published the same day a gunman opened fire on Republican politicians practicing for a congressional charity baseball game in a Washington, D.C., suburb, wounding six, including Republican Rep. Steve Scalise.

The Times editorial board wrote that before the 2011 Arizona mass shooting that killed six people and left Giffords with a traumatic brain injury, Palin’s political action committee had fueled a violent atmosphere by circulating a map that put the congressional districts of Giffords and 19 other Democrats in a stylized crosshair.

Two days later, the Times published a correction saying the editorial had “inaccurately described” the map and “incorrectly asserted there was a link between political rhetoric and the 2011 shooting.”

During the trial, Palin, in her testimony, accused the Times of deliberately fabricating information to tarnish her reputation.

Bennet testified that while he was responsible for the misinformation in the editorial, it was an honest mistake and he had no intention of causing harm.