Jed Rakoff: Last News

Before the jury rendered its verdict in favor of the New York Times in Sarah Palin’s libel trial, some of its members say that they were tipped to the judge’s plan to dismiss the case.

A federal appeals court has revived Sarah Palin‘s defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, finding fault with the way that a trial court judge announced that he planned to dismiss the case as a jury was deliberating.

A jury found that New York Times and one of its top editors were not liable in Sarah Palin’s defamation lawsuit, affirming a judge’s earlier announcement that he would dismiss the case irregardless of their decision.

Ethan Shanfeld Sarah Palin’s defamation lawsuit against The New York Times will be dismissed, a federal judge announced on Monday, saying the former Alaska governor’s team failed to meet the court’s high standards for public figures to make their case.Palin’s team was unable to prove that the newspaper acted with actual malice when it published a 2017 editorial erroneously connecting Palin to a 2011 mass shooting in Tuscon, Ariz., NPR reported. According to Judge Jed Rakoff, Palin’s lawyers failed to present sufficient evidence against the paper or former page editor James Bennet. Palin’s team would have had to prove that Bennet, who inserted the Palin-related language in the article, knew the characterization was false or that the probability of it being false was so great as to mean he was acting with reckless indifference to the facts.

A federal judge said on Monday that he will dismiss Sarah Palin’s libel case against The New York Times, concluding that Palin’s lawyers had failed to meet a very high burden of showing actual malice.

Attorneys for Sarah Palin and The New York Times wrapped up their case on Friday with lengthy closing arguments, leaving it to jurors to decide whether a faulty 2017 editorial that linked the former governor’s political action committee to a mass shooting was merely “a mess up” or actual malice.

Sarah Palin briefly took the stand in her libel trial against The New York Times on Wednesday, while the editor responsible for inserting incorrect language in a 2017 op ed said that he “felt terrible” about the mistake, but denied that it was intentional.

The jury selection and trial in Sarah Palin’s libel lawsuit against The New York Times had been set to start on Monday, but there is an unexpected twist: The former Alaska governor tested positive for Covid.