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A federal appeals court has granted Sarah Palin a new trial in her defamation case against The New York Times, following “major” issues involving the jury at her last trial, including push alerts to jurors that signalled the judge overseeing the case was ready to dismiss it.
In February 2022, a jury unanimously determined that the newspaper and then-editorial director James Bennet were not liable for defamation over a 2017 editorial about the rise in violent political rhetoric.
But before the jury’s decision was announced, District Judge Jed Rakoff told the court that he would dismiss Palin’s complaint anyway, determining that no reasonable jury would find that the newspaper and editor acted with actual malice in publishing the article.
News of that announcement reportedly reached jurors through push alerts to their phones.
Despite the judge’s moves to dismiss the case and the jury’s verdict, “several major issues at trial” — including how jurors learned about the cases’s dismissal — “impugn the reliability of that verdict,” a panel of appeals court judges in New York wrote on Wednesday, more than two years after the decision was delivered.
At the center of Palin’s lawsuit is an editorial from the newspaper written in the aftermath of a 2017 shooting at a congressional baseball game that criticized volatile political rhetoric.
Palin was not the subject of the editorial, but a map from her political action committee — featuring crosshairs over Democratic-leaning congressional districts — was cited as an example, pointing to a 2011 shooting in Arizona that nearly killed then-congresswoman Gabby Giffords.
In the course of editing the story, Bennet added a sentence saying that “the link to political incitement was clear” – which Palin argued had falsely implied a causal link between herself and the 2011 shooting.
The editorial was corrected hours later, and the court heard testimony from New York Times writers about the editorial process and the mistakes made in handling the editorial, as well as efforts to correct it.
In remarks after the trial, Judge Rakoff said the case was an “an example of very unfortunate editorializing” but that it did not rise to the standard of “actual malice” — a standard established by the Supreme Court in libel cases against public figures in a landmark 1967 ruling involving another case involving the newspaper, The New York Times Co v Sullivan.
Palin’s complaint marked the rare case in which a libel suit against a newspaper made it to trial, one that has been closely watched by press freedom groups, First Amendment lawyers and media organizations for its potential impact to the kinds of broad legal protections for journalists and publishers when writing about public figures.
Right-wing figures and Republican allies — including Donald Trump — have filed several lawsuits targeting the Sullivan precedent in an effort to more easily attack antagonist press outlets and critical coverage.
In her testimony during the trial, Palin — the former Alaska governor and John McCain’s running mate in the 2008 presidential election — said she felt “powerless” and lacked a platform to combat the editorial.
“It was devastating to read, again, an accusation, false accusation, that I had anything to do with murdering innocent people,” she said from the witness stand.
She admitted, however, that she routinely made appearances on Fox News, at major political events, and on her own reality television series, as well as The Masked Singer, which she called the “most fun 90 seconds of my life.”
“If the intent was to defame, if the intent was to harm political rivals,” why would Bennet admit the mistake, take responsibility, and seek to correct the record following publication, New York Times attorney David Axelrod asked in his closing arguments.
“This wasn’t a quiet correction,” he said.
Palin appealed the jury’s verdict within weeks after the decision was reached.
“The jury is sacrosanct in our legal system, and we have a duty to protect its constitutional role, both by ensuring that the jury’s role is not usurped by judges and by making certain that juries are provided with relevant proffered evidence and properly instructed on the law,” appeals court judges wrote on Wednesday.
