NEW YORK — Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin testified Thursday that she was “mortified” by a 2017 New York Times editorial that suggested her political messaging incited a mass shooting — and likened her case to a fight of biblical proportions.
“I felt powerless. I knew that, you know, if I wanted to raise my head and try to get the word out that there were untruths printed, once again, I knew that I was up against Goliath, and I felt, collectively, that I was David,” the GOP firebrand recalled in Manhattan Federal Court.
“What were the stones that David could use to halt these actions of this Goliath?” Palin asked.
The editorial in question, “America’s Lethal Politics,” ran in The Times’ print edition on June 14, 2017, after a shooting at a congressional baseball practice in Alexandria, Va. that wounded Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.).
The article argued that heated political rhetoric led to the bloodshed and pointed to the 2011 attempted assassination of Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.) as an example.
The Times’ former editorial page editor, James Bennet, wrote that in the Giffords attack, “the link to political incitement was clear.” He said that “before the shooting,” Palin’s political action committee SarahPAC put out a graphic with stylized crosshairs over Giffords and 19 other Democrats.
But the image, a map of the U.S., featured Democratic electoral districts as targets, not the officials themselves, and it was published online months before the shooting. There was no evidence Jared Lee Loughner — who killed six others, including a child when he shot Giffords — had ever seen it.
The Times issued a correction the morning after the story was published. The paper’s lawyers and Bennet maintain it was an honest misunderstanding.
To win the case, Palin must prove they displayed “actual malice” in running the story, that it wasn’t just an accident, and that it genuinely harmed her reputation.
On the stand Wednesday, Palin portrayed herself as a private citizen now leading a quaint, quiet life in a small mountain town — far from the national stage where she rose to notoriety in 2008 as the late Sen. John McCain’s vice-presidential running mate.
“There I was up in Wasilla, Alaska — up against those who buy ink by the barrel. And here I was with my No. 2 pencil,” she testified.
But as The Times’ lawyer David Axelrod peppered Palin with questions during a tense back and forth Thursday, she admitted that she still appears regularly on Fox News, advises political candidates, and has publicly mulled running for office again.
Palin, who has 1.3 million Twitter followers, struggled to provide an example of how the editorial harmed her.
“Governor, you can’t identify anybody who shied away from you as a result of the publication of the editorial, can you?” asked Axelrod.
“I can’t name names of my friends or those who know me who shied away, no,” said Palin.
First Amendment experts say Palin’s longshot lawsuit has the potential to upend decades of precedent and press freedoms if it makes it to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The same lawyers who defended ex-wrestler Hulk Hogan in his $140 million lawsuit against the website Gawker are representing Palin. Tech billionaire Peter Thiel bankrolled the Hogan lawsuit, bankrupting the gossip site and its creators.
Palin has refused to say who is paying her legal bills.
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