Sarah Palin’s request for a new trial in her libel case against the New York Times has been scuppered, with the judge ruling the former governor of Alaska failed to provide “even a speck” of evidence that the newspaper acted maliciously.
On Tuesday, US district judge Jed S Rakoff ruled that Palin had failed to prove the newspaper had malicious intent when it published an erroneous 2017 op-ed that linked Palin’s rhetoric to the shooting of former US representative Gabrielle Giffords.
“The striking thing about the trial here was that Palin, for all her earlier assertions, could not in the end introduce even a speck of such evidence,” wrote Rakoff in his decision. “Palin’s motion is hereby denied in its entirety.”
Rakoff further noted that while the Times’ editors made mistakes while publishing the op-ed, “a mistake is not enough to win if it was not motivated by actual malice”.
Lawyers for Palin did not immediately respond to requests for comment from several media outlets.
Palin’s lawyers had requested a new trial after alleging that Rakoff made errors during evidentiary rulings for the trial, including how jurors were questioned during jury selection and instructions jurors were given to questions asked during deliberation.
“In actuality, none of these was erroneous, let alone a basis for granting Palin a new trial,” said Rakoff of the lawyers’ allegations.
The former Alaska governor first lost her defamation lawsuit in February after a jury found that the Times did not maliciously damage Palin’s reputation for publishing the 2017 editorial.
Palin claimed that the 2017 article hurt her career as a political commentator and consultant while lawyers for the Times characterized the editorial as an “honest mistake” that was not meant to harm Palin.
During the initial trial, Rakoff ruled that he would disregard the jury’s verdict if they sided with Palin, noting that Palin had not proven the paper acted maliciously.
Palin’s lawyers had requested a new trial in part after discovering that jurors had found out on their smartphones about Rakoff’s decision to rule against Palin before coming to their own verdict. Rakoff rejected that argument, saying that several jurors had noted to the court’s clerk that learning of his decision “had not affected them in any way or played any role whatever in their deliberations”.
In April, Palin said she would contest Alaska’s only US House seat after the death of representative Don Young, her first political campaign since being John McCain’s running mate in the 2008 presidential election.
