Sarah Palin overturned a judge's erroneous decisions and kept defamation lawsuit she lost twice going - only to end it [View all]

Source: Law & Crime

Mar 17th, 2026, 10:30 am


Former Republican governor of Alaska and onetime candidate for vice president Sarah Palin quietly walked away from her appeal of her second trial loss to the New York Times, bringing a nearly nine-year saga and defamation lawsuit to an end.

Palin's first go-round at the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals went well, as the court ripped Senior U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff for the series of "major issues" that arose at the tail end of the first trial in 2022.

The judge controversially ruled, on his own during jury deliberations, that no reasonable juror could find the Times and its former opinion editor James Bennet acted with actual malice when the 2017 editorial linked a "cross hairs" map "circulated" by Palin's political action committee, SarahPAC, to the 2011 mass shooting in Arizona carried out by Jared Lee Loughner, who killed six people and "grievously wound[ed] Representative Gabby Giffords," a Democrat and the wife of Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz.

While the original version of the editorial was corrected within 14 hours after publication, Palin embarked on a long and winding road to sue and challenge landmark defamation precedent, but she eventually reached a roadblock in the form of Rakoff and the jury.

Read more: https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/sarah-palin-overturned-judge-error-to-keep-suing-new-york-times-but-brings-case-to-unceremonious-end/