US District Court Judge Jed Rakoff has thrown out former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s defamation suit against the New York Times. With the jury still out, the judge said the Republican politician’s legal team failed to prove the paper actually meant to defame her.
Palin, who was John McCain’s running mate on the 2008 Republican ticket, sued over the 2017 Times editorial linking her to a 2011 shooting spree that left then-Congresswoman Gabby Giffords (D-Arizona) gravely wounded and six other people killed. Less than a year before Giffords’ shooting, Palin’s political action committee SarahPAC published a map using a crosshairs image to point out Democrat-held congressional districts.
There was no direct link between the map and shooting, but the 2017 Times editorial said the “link to political incitement was clear.” It was written in the wake of another shooting, in which a Democrat targeted Republican lawmakers and left Representative Steve Scalise (R-Louisiana) wounded.
According to Judge Rakoff, Palin’s lawyers did not provide enough evidence that the Times had knowingly published something that was false, under the “actual malice” standard established in a 1964 case also involving the newspaper. Jurors in Palin’s will continue to deliberate her case, but Rakoff said that a judgment in the former governor’s favor will inevitably lead to an appeal.
In her own testimony, Palin referred to the Times as a “Goliath” that spread “lies” about her. Palin’s lawyer Kenneth Turkel argued that the former governor was far from public life when the Times published their story.
“Sarah Palin has done nothing to deserve this…All they had to do was dislike her a little less and we’re not sitting here today,” he argued.
The Times did run a correction on the original editorial the morning after it was published.
“An earlier version of this editorial incorrectly stated that a link existed between political incitement and the 2011 shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords,” the correction read, admitting “no such link was established.”