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MANHATTAN (CN) — A New York Times editorial in 2017 that briefly linked Sarah Palin’s campaign rhetoric to a deadly shooting six years earlier “was like The New York Times ripped a Band-Aid off and wanted to do this all over again,” the former Alaska Governor testified in Manhattan federal court on Monday morning.
“It was pretty devastating to read,” Palin said to kick off the second week of her defamation retrial against The New York Times.
Palin sued the Times and former editorial page editor James Bennet after her name appeared in a 2017 opinion piece by the Times editorial board, titled “America’s Lethal Politics,” on the day gunfire broke out at a congressional baseball practice.
The editorial, a version of which appeared in print on June 15, blamed overheated political rhetoric for inciting gun violence, focusing in particular on a map that a political action committee for Palin had released featuring the stylized crosshairs of a gun over several election districts controlled by Democrats.
Less than a year after the map was disseminated, former congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who represented one of those districts, was shot in the head at a “Congress on Your Corner” event in Tucson, Arizona.
Though the Times called the link from the 2011 shooting to Palin’s campaign materials “clear” and “direct,” within 14 hours it had published a correction saying there was no such link. No evidence has ever been shown that the Tucson shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, saw the Palin PAC’s map.
During witness testimony in her revived libel trial on Monday, Palin said the editorial had painfully reopened old wounds of being condemned for inciting a mass shooting that she had already been exonerated from.
“This was ripping the Band-Aid off, knowing that again I was being put in a position of being lied about, being blamed for a mass murder, despite evidence — in very credible publications and by experts over many years — that I didn’t have anything to do with inciting the murder of these people — and yet The New York Times, the Old Gray Lady, the loudest voice in the room… They were saying again that this was my fault,” she testified.
Largely echoing her testimony from when her libel case first stood trial in 2022, Palin testified that the corrections and revisions issued by the Times left her wanting a more sufficient remedy and a “genuine correction.”
“It has nothing to do with me. It’s not correcting anything about Sarah Palin. It doesn’t mention my name,” she said. “I don’t know any reasonable person that would read that and say, ‘Oh, Sarah Palin, after all, didn’t have anything to do with a mass murder of innocent people.’”
“Did that fix it for you?” her attorney Ken Turkel asked.
“Absolutely not, this makes it worse,” she testified. “They don’t use my name, they do not exonerate me. They do not let their readers know that I did not have anything to do with a deranged killer.”
“I was looking for some accountability in our press, as represented by The New York Times, and there was none,” she added.
On cross-examination by Wilmer Hale partner Felicia Ellsworth, Palin testified “so-called crosshairs” on her map circulated by her PAC were actually “emojis” chosen by a firm that had plucked the idea of bullseye targets on a map of the country from a similar campaign map put out by Democrats.
Pressed by the Times on cross-examination, Palin recalled high-profile speaking events she was invited to in the years following the gun violence editorial, potentially rebutting her claims for reputational harm.
Ellsworth asked Palin about a nearly eight-minute video Palin published to her Facebook page in 2011 condemning those who blame political rhetoric for the Tucson shooting, which used the language “blood libel” and drew criticism for invoking an ancient antisemitic conspiracy that Jews use the blood of non-Jewish children for ritual purposes.
Palin said she had only meant it as a more literal interpretation of the phrase, to warn journalists in the wake of the Tucson shooting to not incite further violence by manufacturing stories if they’re purporting to condemn heated political rhetoric.
U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff, a Bill Clinton appointee, initially dismissed Palin’s case for failing to identify anyone at the Times who had acted with actual malice, but in 2019 the Second Circuit revived her lawsuit.
Palin’s first redo in the lower court went to trial in early 2022 where she was ultimately dealt defeat, both by the jury’s verdict and Rakoff’s mid-deliberation dismissal by Rule 50 judgment one day earlier.
Revived once again by the Second Circuit, Palin’s civil retrial in the Southern District of New York is a stress test of long-established legal protections that protect American media against defamation claims by public figures.
In New York Times v. Sullivan, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1964 that the First Amendment protects statements about public figures, including false ones, unless officials can prove actual malice.
Last month, the Supreme Court declined to review a challenge by Trump megadonor and casino mogul Steve Wynn that aimed to overturn the core ruling on press freedom.
Wynn, a billionaire who oversaw the construction and operation of iconic Las Vegas casinos including The Mirage, Treasure Island and the Bellagio, petitioned the high court in an effort to lower the standard needed for public figures to sue over media reports.
Jurors are expected to hear closing arguments in The New York Times case on Tuesday, April 22.
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