Former Republican vice presidential candidate and Alaska governor Sarah Palin will have a second chance to try the New York Times for defamation when the parties meet in a New York courtroom on Monday.
An appeals court revived the case last August, after several twists and turns that saw a district court throw it out.
Breitbart News reported at the time:
As Breitbart News reported in February 2022, U.S. Judge Jed S. Rakoff, a Bill Clinton appointee to the federal bench in the Southern District of New York, dismissed the case even as jurors were still deliberating over the verdict.
Palin sued the Times over a 2017 editorial in which it said that she had inspired the 2011 mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona. Judge Rakoff initially dismissed the case, but it was revived by a federal appeals court. After the presentation of arguments in initial motions, Rakoff decided that Palin had enough evidence to allow the case to go to trial — a rarity in defamation suits by public figures against the media, since the standard of proving “actual malice” is usually too high for plaintiffs to clear.
Moreover, Rakoff sent the case to the jury after closing arguments last week. But on Monday, as NPR’s David Folkenflik reported, he had second thoughts, and said Palin failed to meet the “actual malice” standard because of the Times‘s correction, and then-editorial page editor James Bennet’s contrition.
The jury found against Palin and in favor of the Times, but only after it learned of Rakoff’s decision to dismiss the case.
A three-judge panel of the Second Circuit — including two George W. Bush appointees, and one Donald Trump appointee — held Wednesday that Rakoff had acted improperly, and ordered a new trial.
Retuers noted: “The trial comes as polls show Americans increasingly distrustful of mainstream media, as more people get their news from social media and outlets whose views conform to their own.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
