Sarah Palin loses her defamation retrial against The New York Times

CNN
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A jury on Thursday shot down Sarah Palin’s second bid against The New York Times, almost eight years after the former Alaska governor first filed her complaint.

The verdict came less than a week after the trial began and two years after she lost her first case against the paper. A retrial was triggered in August after a federal appeals court found that Judge Jed Rakoff, who also presided over this month’s proceedings, had improperly dismissed the case.

“We want to thank the jurors for their careful deliberations. The decision reaffirms an important tenet of American law: publishers are not liable for honest mistakes,” a Times spokesperson said in a statement.

Representatives for Palin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The retrial’s outcome comes as little surprise, however, given both Rakoff and a federal jury ruled against Palin the first time around. Still, the media landscape has changed over the past few years as trust in media has declined, setting up a situation that was potentially less favorable to the Times.

Palin first filed her lawsuit against the Times and former editor James Bennet in June 2017 after the paper ran an editorial alleging Palin had engaged in “political incitement” ahead of the 2011 shooting of Gabby Giffords. According to Palin’s lawsuit, the editorial incorrectly claimed an advertisement run by the former governor’s political action committee placed “Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.”

The Times released a correction less than 24 hours later, clarifying that “no such link was established” but noting that the error did not “undercut or weaken the argument of the piece.”

This is a developing story and will be updated.