A federal judge said on Friday that there was enough evidence in Sarah Palin’s defamation lawsuit against The New York Times Company to send it to a jury trial, a victory for the former vice-presidential candidate and governor. The suit, filed in June 2017, is centered on a Times editorial published that month under the headline “America’s Lethal Politics.”In her complaint, Ms. Palin said the newspaper’s editorial board had wrongly and intentionally linked her to a 2011 mass shooting in which Gabrielle Giffords, a congresswoman from Arizona, was severely wounded and six people were killed. The Times issued a correction for the editorial two days after it was published. The judge, Jed S. Rakoff of Federal District Court in Manhattan, dismissed Ms. Palin’s suit two months after it was filed, saying of the mistaken editorial: “Negligence this may be; but defamation of a public figure it plainly is not.” Last year, a three-judge panel overturned that decision and reinstated the case.

Source: New York Times August 29, 2020 00:45 UTC