A federal jury ruled on Tuesday against Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and Nominé Républicaine vice-presidential, in his defamation trial of a year against the New York Times. The jury made the verdict after two hours of deliberations.
Ms. Palin continued the Times in 2017 after the newspaper’s publication – then quickly corrected and apologized – an editorial who wrongly suggested that she had prompted a fatal shooting in Arizona for years earlier.
The case has become a Belwether for battles on press freedoms and media biases in the Trump era, Ms. Palin’s lawyers saying that they hoped to attack a precedent from the Supreme Court old decades that makes public figures to continue the defamation media.
This is the second time that a federal jury has concluded that the Times was not responsible for defaming Ms. Palin in her editorial. The case was tried for the first time in 2022, and the jury and the judge ruled in favor of the time. But last year, a federal court of appeal invalidated these decisions, paving the path to the new trial of this month.
It is not clear if the verdict will be the end of the eight years of the trial or if the lawyers of Mrs. Palin will call again.
The trial stems from an editorial The Times published in June 2017 after the attack of a left shooter against the Republicans of the Congress in a baseball field in Virginia.
The editorial incorrectly established a link between a mass shooting in 2011, which seriously injured the representative Gabriel Giffords, and a card that the political action committee of Ms. Palin had created with rifle hair in the democratic districts of the Congress, including Ms. Giffords. The 2017 editorial was trying to take stock of the atmosphere of overheated political rhetoric in which the shots had occurred.
During the trial, Ms. Palin told the jury that the editorial had “launched the punch” immediately, damaging his reputation. She said that it had sparked another series of criticisms of her years after distributing the card.
She said that the Times had not apologized personally to him and that she thought that the correction delivered was insufficient because she did not appoint PAC.
It is a story in development. Come back for updates.
