Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin lost her defamation retrial against The New York Times over a 2017 editorial she said damaged her reputation, Reuters reported on Tuesday.
The federal jury found the media company not liable after deliberating for about two hours.
Palin, a former Republican vice presidential nominee, lost a previous trial in 2022 against the media company but won a new one due to “several major issues” in the case, as a federal appellate panel put it last year.
Palin’s lawsuit stemmed from an editorial called “America’s Lethal Politics,” which compared two political shootings: the 2011 killing of six people and the injury of 13 others in Arizona, including then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, a Democrat; and the 2017 Virginia shooting that seriously injured four people, including Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., at a congressional baseball game practice.
The Times editorial argued there was a clear and direct link between the Arizona shooting and the political incitement arising from a digital graphic published in March 2010 by Palin’s political action committee. The graphic was a map that superimposed crosshairs over 20 congressional districts represented by Democrats, including Giffords’.
But a relationship between the crosshairs map and the shooting “was never established,” as the appeals court wrote last year, adding that the incident was rather “viewed as a tragic result” of the shooter’s serious mental illness. (A correction on the editorial currently reads: “An editorial on Thursday about the shooting of Representative Steve Scalise 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.”) The Times said in a statement after the appellate ruling last year, “This decision is disappointing. We’re confident we will prevail in a retrial.” This is a developing story. Check back for updates. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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