Sarah Palin Libel Case Against New York Times Heads To Jury

Attorneys for Sarah Palin and The New York Times wrapped up their case on Friday with lengthy closing arguments, leaving it to jurors to decide whether a faulty 2017 editorial that linked the former governor’s political action committee to a mass shooting was merely “a mess up” or actual malice.

Jurors went into deliberations after they were presented with instructions by U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff.

During the trial, James Bennet, who was then the Times opinion editor and also is a defendant in the case, said that he was to blame for inserting, under the pressure of a deadline, sentences that linked the “incitement” of Palin’s PAC to the 2011 Tucson shootings in which six people were killed and congresswoman Gabby Giffords was severely wounded. Palin sued in 2017.

The editorial was written and published online on June 14, 2017, inspired by a shooting earlier in the day: James Hodgkinson opened fire on several Republican members of Congress who had been engaging in practice for a softball game, seriously wounding Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA).

During closing arguments, Palin’s attorney Kenneth Turkel argued that there was ample evidence that the Times had reckless disregard for the truth, one of the thresholds for winning a libel suit. He noted that Bennet, seeking to find an example of a Republican engaging in “political incitement,”  wrote the line in the op-ed even after he ordered research that showed that the link was false. It also included a hyperlink to an ABC News story that said that no link was ever shown between the Palin PAC and the shooter, Jared Lee Loughner.

The attorney for the Times, David Axelrod, told jurors that the op-ed was an “honest mistake” that was quickly corrected.

“There was no conspiracy,” Axelrod said. “This was a mess up, a goof.”

He pointed to a Times Twitter posting, alerting readers of the revised language, that read, “We screwed up.”

“Why would they write, ‘We screwed up,’ if they intended to harm someone?” Axelrod said.

The original Times editorial, headlined America’s Lethal Politics, read, “Was this attack evidence of how vicious American politics has become? Probably. In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized crosshairs.”

The Times issued a correction and revised the editorial the day after it posted online. The Times also conceded that it had incorrectly characterized a map from Palin’s political action committee that featured crosshairs over certain Democrats’ electoral districts, including Giffords’.

Axelrod argued that Palin had not shown that the Times knew what they were printing was false, one of the central thresholds for public figures like Palin to prevail in a libel case.

He also argued that Palin’s reputation was not damaged, pointing to her ability to garner speaking engagements afterward, along with a spot on Fox’s The Masked Singer in 2020.

“The Masked Singer. Do they put on inciters of violence?” Axelrod asked.

“Yes, Governor Palin said that she was mortified. That doesn’t mean it was defamatory,” he said.

Turkel noted that the Times ran a correction, but it did not include an apology or refer to Palin by name, while keeping the name of her political action committee in the revised op-ed.

He also countered a Times‘ defense: That Bennet’s use of the word “incitement” was not meant to suggest that that the rhetoric Palin’s PAC had a direct link to Loughner’s attack. Bennet testified that he used the word more broadly, to point to the environment of harsh rhetoric, but Turkel noted that few people were reading it that way.

Turkel said that the editorial was “indicative of an arrogance and sense of power that’s uncontrolled” at the Times, with disdain toward conservative figures like Palin, per the AP.

“All they had to do was dislike her a little less, and we’re not sitting here today,” he said.