Court: Sarah Palin libel lawsuit against NY Times to go to trial
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated the lawsuit after it was dismissed by the District Court Judge Jed Rakoff, and denied the Times’ petition for rehearing.
The suit then went back to the District Court, and the NY Times moved for summary judgment...
The District Court just denied the NY Times motion for summary judgment, ordering the case to go to trial.
The Order details the timeline of the Times editorial process that gave rise to the editorial, including the removal of material from the first draft that would have cast doubt on Palin’s responsibility. After publication, people within the Times, including columnist Ross Douthat, internally notified the editors that there was no evidence to support the claim against Palin.
Less than a day after the Editorial’s publication, after having found no evidence of the “link” to which it referred, the Times revised and corrected the Editorial. The Times published the first revised online version at 11:15 a.m. on June 15, 2017…. In it, the Times deleted the phrases “the link to political incitement was clear” and “[t]hough there’s no sign of incitement as direct as in the Giffords attack” and added the sentence “But no connection to that crime was ever established.” In addition, the Times published a series of corrections, which ultimately clarified that no link between political rhetoric and the 2011 shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords was ever established….
