A Manhattan jury has found that the New York Times is not liable for allegedly defaming ex-Alaska Governor Sarah Palin in an editorial piece it published in 2017.
The verdict marks the second loss for Palin in her quest against the newspaper over the editorial, which she says wrongfully linked her to a mass shooting in Arizona that left six people dead.
Palin lost her first trial in 2022 in a unanimous jury verdict, but an appeals court found the jury was erroneously tainted and threw out the verdict in August.
In response to the retrial victory, the Times issued a statement saying: “The decision reaffirms an important tenet of American law: publishers are not liable for honest mistakes.”
Palin, 61, who was also once a Republican vice-presidential candidate, originally filed her lawsuit in 2017.
She argued her reputation was damaged by the Times opinion piece titled America’s Lethal Politics, written by James Bennet. It said Palin’s rhetoric helped incite the 2011 mass shooting in an Arizona parking lot that severely wounded former US congresswoman Gabby Giffords and killed six other people.
A fundraising group for Ms Palin had circulated a map of electoral districts that put Giffords and 19 other Democrats under “stylised crosshairs”, the newspaper said.
It corrected the editorial 14 hours after it appeared online and conceded the wording used in it was flawed.
US law sets a particularly high bar for media to be found liable for defamation when writing about public figures.
The judge in Palin’s original lawsuit said she failed to prove the Times acted with “actual malice”, a sentiment echoed by the Times’s lawyers after Tuesday’s ruling.
“To win this case, Governor Palin needs to prove that the New York Times and James Bennet did not care about the truth,” said Felicia Ellsworth, a lawyer for the newspaper.
“There has not been one shred of evidence showing anything other than an honest mistake.”
Palin’s lawyer Ken Turkel had a different take, saying during closing arguments that “this is not an honest mistake”.
“For [Palin], it was a life-changer,” Mr Turkel said.
In 2022, Palin twice lost to her Democratic challenger during a bid for Congress, once during a special election and once during the midterms.
The Republican ran for vice-president with the late Senator John McCain, who was defeated in 2008 by Barack Obama.
By BBC News
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