New York Times failed to apologise to Sarah Palin, court hears in defamation trial

New York — Sarah Palin’s lawyer faulted the New York Times on Tuesday for failing to apologise to the former Republican US vice-presidential candidate for false statements in a 2017 editorial about gun control as jurors heard opening statements in the retrial of her defamation case against the newspaper.

A lawyer for the New York Times told the jury of five women and four men in Manhattan federal court that the newspaper acknowledged it made a mistake, apologised in writing for making an error and quickly published a correction 14 hours after the editorial appeared online.

Palin, 61, lost her first trial against the Times and former editorial page editor James Bennet in 2022. But the second US Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan last August decided that the verdict was tainted by several rulings by the presiding judge, and ordered a retrial.

Palin, who served as Alaska governor from 2006 to 2009, failed in her 2008 bid for the second-highest US office, with running mate John McCain.

Palin sued the newspaper after it published an editorial on June 14 2017, bearing the headline “America’s Lethal Politics” that wrongly suggested she may have incited a January 2011 mass shooting in an Arizona parking lot. Six people were killed and Democratic US representative Gabby Giffords was seriously wounded.

Bennet had added language — he said under deadline pressure — identifying a “clear” link between the shooting and a map from Palin’s political action committee that put Giffords and other Democrats in crosshairs.

Felicia Ellsworth, a lawyer for the newspaper, described for the jury the corrective steps it took after the editorial was published.

“James and the New York Times did the exact opposite of what you would expect someone who actually wanted to harm Governor Palin to do,” Ellsworth said during her opening statement.

Shane Vogt, a lawyer for Palin, said the corrections were insufficient because they did not reference Palin by name.

“They just couldn’t bring themselves to say, ‘governor Palin, we’re sorry, we made this mistake about you’,” said Vogt, who represented professional wrestler Hulk Hogan in a 2016 defamation trial that led to the bankruptcy of online news outlet Gawker.

In reviving Palin’s case, the Second Circuit said US district judge Jed Rakoff wrongly excluded evidence that she offered to show Bennet knew she did not incite the shooting. It also faulted Rakoff’s excluding evidence about Bennet’s relationship with his brother Michael Bennet, the Democratic senator from Colorado, that Palin said could establish bias.

Palin has viewed her case as a vehicle to overturn New York Times v Sullivan, a landmark 1964 US Supreme Court ruling. The Supreme Court in that case set a standard that to win a defamation suit, a public figure must demonstrate that the offending statement was made with “actual malice”, meaning with knowledge it was false or with reckless disregard whether it was false.

The Second Circuit, however, said Palin waived the argument by waiting too long to challenge Sullivan’s “actual malice” standard.

The US Supreme Court on March 24 turned away a bid by casino mogul Steve Wynn to roll back defamation protections established under New York Times v Sullivan, a standard also questioned by President Donald Trump.

McCain, who served as a Republican US senator from Arizona, chose Palin as his vice-presidential running mate in the 2008 election that they lost to Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

Reuters