A federal judge rejected a bid from the New York Times, which will allow a defamation lawsuit being brought on by former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin to go to trial.
U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff in Manhattan ruled against the paper’s motion on the suit and set a trial date for February for the former Alaska governor, who claims that the New York Times defamed her through a 2017 op-ed that tied her to a mass shooting. Rakoff, in his decision, concluded that Palin’s case is circumstantial, but there is a chance a jury could find that the outlet had acted with “actual malice by clear and convincing evidence.”
The trial will begin on Feb. 1, 2021.
“We’re disappointed in the ruling but are confident we will prevail at trial when a jury hears the facts,” New York Times spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades-Ha told Reuters.
The piece Palin is suing over was titled “America’s Lethal Politics,” and it was written by the editorial board and published on June 14, 2017.
The piece mainly focused on two shootings — when then-Rep. Gabby Giffords was among a group of people shot at by Jared Lee Loughner in a supermarket parking lot, killing six people, and when James Hodgkinson opened fire on Republican lawmakers practicing in Alexandria, Virginia, ahead of the annual Congressional Baseball Game. The editorial came out the same day Hodgkinson wounded four, including Rep. Steve Scalise.
The piece noted that Palin’s political action committee had circulated a map that put 20 Democrats, including Giffords, under “stylized cross hairs,” while the Scalise attack at that time had shown “no sign of incitement as direct as in the Giffords attack,” but an editor’s note was later added. The updated version states, “But in that case no connection to the shooting was ever established,” in reference to the Giffords shooting.
The editor’s note says that the original piece “incorrectly stated that a link existed between political rhetoric and the 2011 shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords. In fact, no such link was established. The editorial also incorrectly described a map distributed by a political action committee before that shooting. It depicted electoral districts, not individual Democratic lawmakers, beneath stylized cross hairs.”
