New York Times prevails in First Amendment case against Palin defamation claims

MANHATTAN (CN) — A jury in New York federal court on Tuesday cleared The New York Times of liability for former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s claims the newspaper defamed her in a 2017 editorial that drew a debunked connection between Palin’s campaign materials and a deadly shooting in an Arizona supermarket parking lot six years earlier.

The jury deliberated for just under two hours before returning the verdict.

In contrast to her typical cheerful demeanor throughout the trial, Palin was noticeably dour as she left court on Tuesday following the verdict and did not comment directly on the outcome. She told reporters outside the courthouse that she looked forward to returning to her kids and grandchildren back home in Alaska and planned to “get on with life.”

Her lawyers said they would be evaluating all post-trial and appellate options.

A spokesperson for The New York Times commended the jurors for “their careful deliberations.”

“The decision reaffirms an important tenet of American law: publishers are not liable for honest mistakes,” Danielle Rhoades Ha said in a statement following the verdict.

In closing arguments on Tuesday morning, The New York Times told jurors that the former Alaska governor failed to prove that the paper acted with “actual malice” when it published an editorial in 2017 that briefly linked Palin’s campaign rhetoric to a deadly mass shooting in a supermarket parking lot six years earlier.

The civil defamation retrial, remanded back to Manhattan federal court after a federal appeals court overturned the outcome of her 2022 trial, was Palin’s third chance to prove that the Times and former opinion editor James Bennet should be held liable for linking 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 — to inciting the 2011 mass shooting in a 2017 editorial titled “America’s Lethal Politics" before publishing a correction the following morning.

New York Times attorney Felicia Ellsworth insisted that the paper made “an honest mistake” when the opinion section published two lines that had stated the link from the 2011 shooting in Tucson, Arizona, to a map circulated by Palin’s political action committee was “clear” and “direct.”

The Times revised the story “loudly, clearly, and quickly” and published a correction noting the following morning there was no such link, Ellsworth told jurors.

“Getting a fact wrong because you didn’t anticipate how your words are going to be interpreted, and then clearing up any confusion 14 hours later, is an honest mistake. It’s not defamation,” she told jurors during the Times’ closing summation on Tuesday morning.

Ellsworth said the challenged statement was about Palin’s political action committee, not about Palin personally.

The New York Times argued that Palin had shown sufficient evidence at trial to demonstrate reputational harm or identify a single person who avoided or thought less of her because of the editorial.

“She hasn’t hired anyone to fix the supposed harm to her reputation,” Ellsworth said. “She didn’t identify a single person who told her they believe she caused the Arizona shooting as a result of the 2017 editorial.”

Rather than being hurt by editorial, the onetime vice presidential nominee is “thriving” in the attention her lawsuit has brought, Ellsworth argued.

“Taking on the traditional media made her popular in 2008 when she ran for vice president, it made her popular in 2022 when she ran for Congress, and she’s hoping it’ll do the same today,” the New York Times lawyer said.

Palin’s closing arguments were delivered by Tampa-based attorney Ken Turkel, who said the false accusations in “America’s Lethal Politics” were a “horribly traumatic” reopening of old wounds for her.

“This was not an honest mistake about passing reference,” he said.

Turkel told jurors that Bennet either “consciously avoided” or “recklessly disregarded” the truth when he did rewrites to “America’s Lethal Politics” that defamatorily linked the so-called crosshairs map circulated by Palin’s campaign to the Tucson shooting.

Echoing Palin’s Monday testimony, Turkel fumed in his closing argument that the correction published by The New York Times did not mention Palin by name or apologize for erroneously connecting her to the deadly shooting.

“It just doesn’t matter to them — it’s like a concession that cannot be made, that she’s a living, breathing human being,” he said. “Seems like they wanted to correct this for the benefit of everyone but her.”

Turkel, who obtained a massive $140 million privacy lawsuit judgment against the gossip website Gawker for publishing a video depicting famed wrestler Hulk Hogan having sex, urged jurors to award Palin damages for “public reputational harm and private mental anguish.”

“We’ve proven this case, and she deserves an award of some kind,” he told jurors. “Find a number, and let her get some kind of closure on this.”

Palin’s civil retrial in the Southern District of New York was 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 the required showing of 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 like 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 in Palin’s retrial received the case for deliberations around 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday.

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