Sarah Palin’s Libel Trial Against The New York Times Begins

A retrial of the yearslong defamation case brought by Sarah Palin against The New York Times got underway before a Manhattan jury on Tuesday.

Ms. Palin, the former Alaska governor and onetime Republican vice-presidential nominee, sued The Times in 2017 over an editorial that erroneously linked her campaign’s language to a mass shooting, which she claimed defamed her.

A federal judge and a jury both ruled against her in a 2022 trial of the case, but Ms. Palin successfully appealed and a new trial was ordered. The same judge, Jed S. Rakoff, is hearing the case again. The arguments are largely the same, but the media landscape in the United States is very different. There have been several high-profile defamation cases that have resulted in multimillion-dollar payouts. And President Trump has continued his multipronged attack on the news media.

In opening statements on Tuesday, lawyers for each side presented arguments over whether The Times had knowingly published a false statement about Ms. Palin. To clear the legal hurdle for defamation, a public figure must prove that the defendant acted with actual malice, or published something despite knowing it was false or with reckless disregard for the truth.

This case centers on a 2017 editorial published by The Times’s editorial board, which is separate from the newsroom, and headlined “America’s Lethal Politics.” It condemned violent political rhetoric in the wake of a gunman’s opening fire on a congressional baseball practice.

The editorial made reference to a 2011 mass shooting that seriously wounded Representative Gabby Giffords and killed six people. Before the shooting, Ms. Palin’s political action committee had put out an ad with stylized cross hairs over some Democratic-controlled congressional districts. The editorial incorrectly made a link between the map and the shooting.

The Times published a correction 14 hours after the original publication, noting that it had “incorrectly stated that a link existed between political rhetoric and the 2011 shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords” and had also incorrectly described the map.

Ms. Palin’s lawyer, Shane Vogt, told the nine-person jury that his team would show that James Bennet, who was then the opinion editor for The Times and in charge of editorials, was the “driving force” behind libeling Ms. Palin and had “injected that narrative” into the editorial that she was to blame for the shooting.

Mr. Vogt also told the jury that the correction that The Times had made was insufficient because it did not mention Ms. Palin by name, nor had The Times apologized personally to Ms. Palin.

Felicia Ellsworth, a lawyer for The Times, acknowledged that The Times had made a mistake in the editorial and said Mr. Bennet, who had rewritten a draft, “made some quick edits on a tight deadline.” Mr. Bennet left The Times in 2020.

“The moment they had reason to think they might have gotten something wrong, they moved quickly to fix it,” Ms. Ellsworth said, noting that The Times had also apologized in a tweet to readers.

The jury must decide, Ms. Ellsworth said, whether this was “an honest mistake or done on purpose,” noting the freedom of speech protections granted by the First Amendment. She added that Ms. Palin was not claiming she had suffered any financial damage from the editorial.

An appeals panel ruled last year that Judge Rakoff had made a number of errors in the last trial, including wrongly preventing jurors from hearing evidence that might have shown that Mr. Bennet was aware or should have been aware that Ms. Palin did not incite the 2011 mass shooting.