Sarah Palin loses defamation retrial against New York Times

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.