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New York Times Editorial Writer Must Testify in Sarah Palin Lawsuit

Sarah Palin in 2016. In a lawsuit, she contends that The New York Times improperly linked her to a 2011 mass shooting.Credit...Eric Thayer for The New York Times

The author of a New York Times editorial will have to testify under oath in a defamation lawsuit filed by the former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, a federal judge ruled on Thursday.

The Times filed a motion last month seeking to dismiss the case, and the judge, Jed S. Rakoff of Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York, said the testimony was necessary to help him determine whether to grant that motion. Judge Rakoff set the hearing for Aug. 16. Judge Rakoff said last month that he would rule by the end of this month on the motion to dismiss the case.

A spokeswoman for The Times said in a statement that the news organization would provide the testimony the judge had ordered. David McCraw, deputy general counsel for The Times, said the witness would be James Bennet, The Times’s editorial page editor.

In the lawsuit, which was filed in June, Ms. Palin contends that The Times “violated the law and its own policies” when it linked her in an editorial to a mass shooting in January 2011. The editorial was published online on June 14, the same day that a gunman opened fire at a baseball field where Republican congressmen were practicing, injuring several people including Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana.

The Times later published a correction and issued an apology on Twitter.

Ms. Palin said in the lawsuit that the editorial conflicted with other articles The Times had published about Ms. Palin’s political activities and the 2011 mass shooting by Jared Loughner in Arizona. It cited several articles in The Times that dismissed the notion that there was any link between Ms. Palin, political rhetoric and the rampage.

“The Times had ample facts available that established that there was no connection between Mrs. Palin and Loughner’s crime,” Ms. Palin said in the lawsuit.

In his order, Judge Rakoff said one of the questions presented by The Times’s motion to dismiss Ms. Palin’s case was “whether the complaint contains sufficient allegations of actual malice, an essential element of the claim.” Determining that, he added, depended in part on whether the author or authors of the editorial were aware of articles in The Times that contradicted what they wrote. That information, he said, was “peculiarly within the knowledge of defendant.”

Follow Sydney Ember on Twitter @melbournecoal.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: Times Editorial Writer Must Testify in Palin Defamation Suit, Judge Orders. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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