Sarah Palin defamation suit back before federal court

James Bennet, the former New York Times Opinion editor, told a jury on Thursday that he was the person responsible for rewriting crucial parts of an editorial that Sarah Palin said defamed her.

- KATIE ROBERTSON

Ms Palin, the former governor of Alaska and one-time Republican vice-presidential nominee, sued the Times in 2017 over the editorial, which erroneously linked her political action committee to a mass shooting. The editorial was fixed and a correction was issued the day after publication.

“I blew it, you know,” Bennet said on the stand, choking up with emotion. “I made a mistake.”

The case is being tried for a second time in a federal court in Manhattan after an appeals court ruled last year that the judge had made several errors that had tainted the previous trial in 2022. In that trial, both the judge and a jury ruled against Ms Palin.

At the 2022 trial, the jury found for the newspaper a day after the judge said he’d throw the case out anyway due to weak evidence.

“I have concluded as a matter of law that the defendants are not liable too,” US District Judge Jed Rakoff told jurors after they delivered their unanimous verdict on that occasion. “So we’ve reached the same bottom line.”

While the jury was still deliberating, Judge Rakoff said he would dismiss Ms Palin’s suit regardless of the verdict, telling lawyers that her legal team had failed to present enough evidence to prove that the newspaper knowingly or recklessly published falsehoods about her when it ran a 2017 opinion piece incorrectly linking her to the deadly shooting.