(CNN Business) — The newspaper New York Times won to defend himself in a defamation lawsuit filed against him by Sarah Palin, after jurors will determine that she did not prove her case.
The nine jurors, who deliberated since Friday afternoon, declared that New York Times is not liable in Palin’s defamation lawsuit against the newspaper.
Unbeknownst to them, during deliberations, Rakoff determined that Palin’s attorneys had failed to prove a key element of their case, so he would overturn the jury’s verdict if it had found in Palin’s favor.
“The law here sets a very high standard (for actual malice),” Rakoff said Monday. “The court finds that that standard has not been met.”
Palin and her attorneys have previously indicated they would consider an appeal if a jury trial did not go their way.
The newspaper’s lawyers celebrated Monday, embracing each other in court after Rakoff made his decision.
“New York Times welcomes today’s decision,” a spokesman said Monday. “It is a reaffirmation of a fundamental principle of American law: Public figures should not be allowed to use defamation lawsuits to punish or intimidate news organizations. who make, quickly recognize and correct unintentional errors”.
Palin’s lawsuit
Palin sued the The New York Times and her former editorial page editor James Bennett in 2017 after they published an editorial that erroneously linked a map that Palin’s political action committee had published to a 2011 shooting that killed six people and wounded former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.
The editorial in question was published on the day of the shooting at a baseball practice that injured Congressman Steve Scalise. He was meant to address the heated political rhetoric before the shooting, but by pointing it out, the Times wrongly said there was a “clear” link between a map that had crosshairs over congressional districts, including Giffords’s, and the shooting that injured her. Bennett testified that he added language that there was a clear link and that once he realized her mistake he worked to issue a correction quickly.
Palin testified that she was “mortified” that the newspaper falsely accused her of abetting the murder of those six people, which included a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl, six years after that deadly shooting.
Bennett testified that he was surprised some people interpreted the editorial as saying that the man who shot Giffords and others was egged on by Palin, testifying that “that’s not the message we intended to send.”