Sarah Palin is back to Manhattan court for a retrial in her lawsuit accusing the New York Times of libeling her in a 2017 editorial about mass shootings.
The former Republican vice presidential candidate and Alaska governor is getting a second chance at arguing that the Grey Lady defamed her by suggesting in the opinion piece that her campaign rhetoric inspired an assassination attempt on Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords six years earlier.
A nine-person jury was selected Monday morning in under an hour, and opening statements are expected to start Tuesday. Palin, 61, who was in court, didn’t comment.
Jurors at the first trial in 2022 found that the newspaper did not defame Palin, but only after several of them had seen a news alert on their phone that the judge had decided to toss the case while they were still deliberating.
Manhattan federal court judge Jed Rakoff found that Palin’s camp had not met the high bar for proving libel against public figures — in which media outlets are required to have published falsehoods with “actual malice.” The judge did rap the Times before throwing out the case for what he called “unfortunate editorializing.”
The jurors insisted that viewing the alerts had no impact on their deliberations. But the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a new trial last August, finding that Rakoff had wrongly excluded evidence favorable to Palin’s case.
The Times’ editorial had been published on June 14, 2017, after a gunman opened fire on the congressional GOP baseball team’s practice, wounding then-House Whip Steve Scalise and three others.
The news outlet noted in the piece, headlined “America’s Lethal Politics,” that Palin’s political action committee had published a map with stylized crosshairs over Giffords’ election district days before the 2011 shooting — which killed six people.
Palin, 60, says the Times libeled her by falsely claiming that there was a “clear link” between her campaign ad and the heinous shooting, despite a lack of evidence that the map motivated Arizona gunman Jared Lee Loughner.
The Times argued throughout the trial that its editors made an honest mistake that was quickly corrected.
Palin took the stand at the first trial and told jurors it was “devastating” to read the editorial linking her to the carnage.
“It was devastating to read, again, an accusation — false accusation, that I had anything to do with murdering innocent people,” she testified.
Palin at the time was dating New York Rangers star Ron Duguay — who supported her in court. The mom of five divorced her husband of 31 years, Todd Palin, in 2019.
A spokesperson for the paper, Charlie Stadtlander, said Monday that the case “revolves around a passing reference to an event in an editorial that was not about Sarah Palin.”
“That reference was an unintended error, and quickly corrected. We’re confident we will prevail and intend to vigorously defend the case.”
The trial is expected to last two weeks and to feature testimony from Palin and James Bennet, the former editorial page director at the Times who inserted the lines at the core of the suit.
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