Jury Begins Deliberating in Palin’s Case Against The Times

Media|Jury Begins Deliberating in Palin’s Case Against The Times

A jury has begun deliberations in the case brought by former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska against The New York Times after her lawyers urged the jurors to find the publication liable for defamation.

Kenneth G. Turkel, a lawyer for Ms. Palin, said that James Bennet, the Times’s opinion editor at the time who had rewritten an editorial at the center of the case, had acted with complete disregard for the truth and for Ms. Palin.

“She’s just a casualty of their theories, their narrative,” Mr. Turkel told the jury in his closing statement.

This is the second time the case has been heard by a jury. Ms. Palin sued The Times and Mr. Bennet in 2017, and a federal judge and the jury ruled against Ms. Palin in the first trial in 2022. But an appeals court overturned that decision, saying the judge had made several errors that had tainted the trial, and ordered a new trial.

The new trial, which began last week, has heard evidence from Ms. Palin and Mr. Bennet, as well as other editors and writers involved in the 2017 editorial. The editorial was published after a gunman opened fire on lawmakers at a baseball practice. The editorial had initially made an incorrect link between a map distributed by Ms. Palin’s political action committee and a 2011 mass shooting in Tucson, Ariz., that severely injured Representative Gabby Giffords.

Mr. Bennet had rewritten a draft of the editorial under deadline pressure, he told the jury, and made a mistake by adding the statement, which he said he had not meant to be read as though the map directly led the gunman to act, nor that Ms. Palin was to blame.