Report: Sarah Palin Intends to File NEW Defamation Lawsuit Against New York Times

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Former Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) reportedly intends to file a new defamation suit against the New York Times, after a judge said he would dismiss her previous case and a jury ruled against her.

ABC News reported Palin wants the judge from her previous case pulled, and that her legal team intends to refile a suit targeting both the publication and editor James Bennet.

U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff announced Palin’s intentions during what was described as “a brief telephone conference with lawyers.”

Palin sued the paper over a 2017 editorial titled “America’s Lethal Politics,” which was published after a number of Republican lawmakers were shot at the annual softball game.

The piece, which was written by the paper’s editorial board, connected the attack to the 2011 shooting of then-Rep. Gabriel Giffords (D-AZ).

A gunman killed six people and left Giffords with a traumatic head injury.

The piece blamed her for Giffords’ shooting, after Palin’s political action committee had published an image on Facebook which showed Giffords’s district under crosshairs, before the shooting.

A correction on the piece read:

An editorial on Thursday about the shooting of Representative Steve Scalise incorrectly stated that a link existed between political rhetoric and the 2011 shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords. In fact, no such link was established. The editorial also incorrectly described a map distributed by a political action committee before that shooting. It depicted electoral districts, not individual Democratic lawmakers, beneath stylized cross hairs.

Palin sued, but Judge Rakoff announced on Feb. 14, prior to deliberations, that she had failed to prove that the paper and Bennet acted with “actual malice.”

The following day, jurors unanimously found that Palin was not defamed.

ABC reported Thursday:

Rakoff said in an order last week that jurors knew before delivering their verdict against Palin earlier this month that he had ruled against her as a matter of law the previous day.

“Rakoff said the jurors repeatedly assured his law clerk that pop-up news notifications on their phones about the judge’s ruling did not affect their deliberations,” reports ABC.