US judge dismisses Sarah Palin defamation suit against New York Times

A New York judge on Monday dismissed a defamation suit filed by former Republican presidential candidate Sarah Palin against the New York Times (NYT), a case that has been considered by freedom of expression and press lawyers.

The jury is set to hear a case in Manhattan’s civil court on Friday over a case in which the Conservative Tea Party exhibited its former glory against the largest media outlet on the planet since 2017.

According to several American newspapers – the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal – the defamation suit has been going on for days a week, with Judge J. Rakoff announcing that Ms. Palin’s request will be rejected before the jury can complete it. Came its negotiations and a verdict.

Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska who was elected Republican presidential candidate John McCain in 2008, was acquitted by a New York judge in the first trial in August 2017 on the grounds that the New York Times’ defamation offense was not included.

The politician appealed.

It all started with a June 2017 editorial in the NYT condemning an insane attack by gunmen on elected Republicans playing baseball near Washington. At the time, the newspaper linked another shooting of Democrat Gabriel Giffords, elected from Arizona in 2011, to a statement from a committee supporting Sarah Palin, in which Ms Giffords’ constituency was marked with a similar line of sight.

The next day, NYT revised its editorial and Ms. The shooter who seriously wounded Giffords and killed six was Ms. Found that there was nothing to confirm that the support committee for Palin was motivated to take action by the campaign.

In this new civil trial, Ms Palin said she felt “unarmed” by the 2017 editorial, when she learned that the newspaper had found no connection between her support committee’s campaign and the shooting.

The New York Times always requests good faith.

The case goes beyond a confrontation between a conservative politician and a New York newspaper.

For the media and lawyers, it is a symbol of freedom of expression and writing about the public is relevant to magazines. In a famous 1964 Supreme Court decision (“New York Times Co. v. Sullivan”), the U.S. Supreme Court imposed a higher level to win an official defamation suit.

It is necessary to prove the “real hatred” of the press that publishes information “knowing it to be false or with complete contempt for the truth”.

For Ms. Palin, this is “virtually impossible,” Dmitry Shakhnevich, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told AFP.