An update on this story:
Sarah Palin’s defamation suit against New York Times resurrected by appeals courtA federal appeals court on Tuesday reversed a judge’s decision dismissing former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s defamation lawsuit against The New York Times for a 2017 editorial that suggested an image produced by Palin’s political action committee incited the 2011 shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords of Arizona.
The appellate panel said Judge Jed Rakoff of U.S. District Court in Manhattan in 2017 had relied on facts outside of legal filings in the case to dismiss the suit against the Times by Palin, who was the Republican vice presidential nominee in 2008.
Rakoff had “erred†by relying on evidence introduced at a hearing in the case, according to the decision by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals.
That evidence was testimony by James Bennet, the editorial page editor who had written the editorial in dispute, who said he had been unaware past articles in the Times and The Atlantic, where he previously had been editor-in-chief, which reported that there was no connection between Palin and her PAC and Jared Loughner, the man who seriously wounded Giffords in a mass shooting.
The appeals court sent the case back to Rakoff, and directed the suit to proceed to the discovery phase, in which parties would begin taking depositions and collecting evidence from each other.
Hopefully team Palin is wary of the trial court judge, given that his ruling was overturned.