Sarah Palin’s defamation lawsuit against the New York Times, over an article in 2017 that falsely blamed her for the Gabby Giffords shooting, has just been revived by a judge:
NY POST – Former US vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin can continue her defamation lawsuit against the New York Times, a court has ruled.
The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan found that a lower court judge was procedurally incorrect in dismissing her complaint.
The former Alaskan governor sued the newspaper in 2017 following the publication of an editorial that she said wrongfully linked her to a 2011 shooting that wounded then-Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords.
“This case is ultimately about the First Amendment, but the subject matter implicated in this appeal is far less dramatic: rules of procedure and pleading standards,” Circuit Court Judge John Walker wrote in his Tuesday opinion.
In her original lawsuit, Palin alleged that the Times falsely accused her of “inciting a mass shooting at a political event in January 2011” and ran a claim it “knew to be false,” according to The Hill.
The paper later published a correction.
“An earlier version of this editorial incorrectly 12 stated that a link existed between political incitement and the 2011 shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords. In fact, no such link was established,” the correction read.
Palin’s lawsuit against the NY Times was dropped by Judge Jed Rakoff in August of 2017, only two months after she filed it. So it’s pretty amazing that her lawsuit is back on again.
Remember, this article written in the New York Times was in the context of the shooting of Republican congressmen by the Bernie Sanders supporter at their baseball practice:
Was this attack evidence of how vicious American politics has become? Probably. In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.
Conservatives and right-wing media were quick on Wednesday to demand forceful condemnation of hate speech and crimes by anti-Trump liberals. They’re right. Though there’s no sign of incitement as direct as in the Giffords attack, liberals should of course hold themselves to the same standard of decency that they ask of the right.
The accusation above was so egregious and I do hope Palin prevails in her lawsuit. The media need to be held accountable for gross misrepresentations of the truth like this.