Sarah Palin granted new trial in defamation lawsuit against the New York Times

New York (CNN) — Two years after Sarah Palin lost her defamation lawsuit against the New York Times, the former vice presidential candidate has been granted a new trial, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.

In 2022, a New York jury found Palin had not proved the Times and its editorial page editor James Bennet were liable for defaming Palin after the newspaper published an editorial that erroneously linked a map that Palin’s political action committee had posted to a 2011 shooting that injured former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

The editorial in question was published on the day of the shooting at a baseball practice in Washington, DC, that injured Rep. Steve Scalise. It was meant to address heated political rhetoric ahead of the shooting, but in making its point, the Times erroneously said that there was a “clear” link between a map Palin’s PAC had posted that included crosshairs over congressional districts, including Giffords’. Bennet testified that he added language about there being a clear link between the two and that once he realized his error, he worked to quickly issue a correction.

Palin sued the Times, but a jury in 2022 found Palin did not prove “actual malice,” the legal standard Palin had to meet in her defamation case because she is a public figure.

But during deliberations, Judge Jed Rakoff ruled that Palin’s attorneys did not prove a key element of their case, and that he would have set aside the jury’s verdict should it have found for Palin.

Palin appealed the case to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which found on Wednesday that by handling the case in the way he did, the judge “improperly intruded on the province of the jury by making credibility determinations, weighing evidence, and ignoring facts or inferences that a reasonable juror could plausibly have found to support Palin’s case.”

The appeals court found “several major issues at trial” including “erroneous exclusion of evidence, an inaccurate jury instruction, a legally erroneous response to a mid-deliberation jury question” and that jurors learned about the judge’s dismissal while they were deliberating via push notifications to their phones.

“Governor Palin is very happy with today’s decision, which is a significant step forward in the process of holding publishers accountable for content that misleads readers and the public in general,” Palin’s attorney Shane Vogt said in a statement. “The truth deserves a level playing field, and Governor Palin looks forward to presenting her case to a jury that is ‘provided with relevant proffered evidence and properly instructed on the law’ as set forth in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals’ opinion.”

A spokesperson for the New York Times called the decision “disappointing.”

“We’re confident we will prevail in a retrial,” Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander said.

Sonia Moghe contributed reporting.

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