After testing positive for COVID-19, the former Alaskan governor’s, Sarah Palin, defamation suit against The New York Times will be delayed. She was not vaccinated.
US District Judge Jed Rakoff issued a ruling that would push back the trial’s start. This comes despite complaints from The Times’ legal team, who said that this would cause further delay on the suit.
However, before voicing the ruling, Rakoff also made a few decisions that favored The Times. For one, he disqualified a key witness from Palin’s camp. He also refused to let the jury hear details of why James Bennet, the Times’ editorial page editor, left his post in 2020.
Experts believe that the libel case will cast unwanted eyes on one of America’s most prominent papers. It is a test of how freedom of speech claims will fare against the right against defamation. Lucy Dalglish, a First Amendment attorney, believes that the Sarah Palin defamation suit is “going to be ugly.” For the most part, former top editors and other media players are keen on seeing how the event will play out.
Sarah Palin Defamation Suit
In a June 2017 editorial, an opinion piece from The Times implied a link between an ad from Palin’s team and a 2011 mass shooting in Arizona. At the time, writer Elizabeth Williamson drafted the piece about another mass shooting outside Washington DC.
However, Bennet wanted to add more meat to the piece. In a later response, he said that he had pushed for the piece to argue for better gun control laws. He had also wanted it to argue against incitement and other aggressive political behavior.
Because of this, he added a line to the original draft. The line said, “the link to political incitement was clear” between the ads and the Arizona shooting. Aside from this, the piece also misinterpreted the ad from Palin’s team.
The Times posted the piece called America’s Lethal Politics on the night of the shooting. Hours after the piece was up, another writer for the columns warned Bennet of the social media ruckus it caused. The writer, Ross Douthat, warned Bennet of the errors. Upon review of the piece, both Williamson and Rakoff took responsibility for the oversight.
The paper quickly revised the story, corrected its posts, and tweeted an apology. They did not mention Palin’s name. She filed the libel suit a few days later.
A high bar for libel cases
The Sarah Palin defamation suit is a libel case, meaning that it maligns an individual on print and not on speech. Whether it is slander vs. libel, both cases are hard to prove in the court of law because the US has a high bar for what counts as defamation.
The Sarah Palin defamation suit will not be an easy win for the outspoken official. Despite The Times’ blunder, she will have to prove that paper and Bennet acted with malice on intent.
Palin is asking for damages. However, experts are saying that it will be hard for her to prove that she lost income because of the piece. Apart from that, in The Times’ defense, the issue was an “honest mistake,” said David McCraw, the paper’s deputy general counsel.
Furthermore, Dalglish says that it is hard to libel a public figure. If the source of libel was an opinion piece, this makes it harder for Palin to convince the court.
The high bar for defamation claims is unlikely to be changed soon. It could, however, find support in US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who has said he wants to overturn the ruling made in 1967.
Whatever the case, the Sarah Palin defamation suit pushback only fuels the fire to the long-awaited trial.
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