Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

A Times Editor Testifies in Defamation Suit Filed by Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin at an event in 2016.Credit...Hilary Swift for The New York Times

The editor of The New York Times editorial page testified on Wednesday that he did not intend in an editorial to blame the former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin for a 2011 mass shooting, but was instead trying to make a point about the heated political environment. The editorial is the focus of a defamation lawsuit brought by Ms. Palin against the news organization.

The editor, James Bennet, said he had wanted to draw a link between charged political rhetoric and an atmosphere of political incitement after a gunman opened fired in June on a baseball field where Republican congressmen were practicing, injuring several people including Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana. But Mr. Bennet said he was not trying to make a direct connection between a map of targeted electoral districts that Ms. Palin’s political action committee had circulated and the 2011 shooting in Arizona by Jared Loughner that severely injured Representative Gabby Giffords.

“I did not intend and was not thinking of it as a causal link to the crime,” Mr. Bennet said. During cross-examination, he said he did not know if Mr. Loughner had seen the map and “did not know if the map incited him to his conduct.”

The hearing was unusual in that judges do not typically collect evidence before making a decision on motions to dismiss.

In the lawsuit, Ms. Palin claimed that The Times editorial linked her to the 2011 shooting despite knowing that the connection was false. She contended that the editorial contradicted other articles in The Times about her political actions and the Arizona shooting and cited several examples of articles that dismissed the idea that political rhetoric had provoked the rampage.

The Times later published a correction to the editorial, saying there was no link between political rhetoric and the shooting. It also issued an apology on Twitter.

Judge Jed S. Rakoff of Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York had ordered the author of the editorial to testify, saying in a two-page filing last week that the testimony would help him determine whether to grant The Times’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit.

Elizabeth Williamson, a member of The Times’s editorial board, wrote the first draft of the editorial; Mr. Bennet testified because he introduced the statements during editing that Ms. Palin cited in the lawsuit. Ms. Palin’s lawyers have until Thursday to ask the judge to compel Ms. Williamson to testify, but it is not clear if they intend to do so.

Judge Rakoff said in his order last week that one of the questions he would consider when weighing The Times’s motion to dismiss the case was whether Ms. Palin’s defamation complaint contained “sufficient allegations of actual malice.” The “actual malice” standard, established decades ago by the Supreme Court with its decision in New York Times v. Sullivan, held that public officials had to show that news organizations had knowingly published false information or had acted with “reckless disregard” for the truth.

Determining that, Judge Rakoff said, depended in part on whether the author of the editorial was aware of other articles in The Times that contradicted what was published in the editorial. He added that he intended to rule on the motion by the end of the month.

Mr. Bennet testified that he did not recall reading, or had not read, articles that dismissed the connection between Ms. Palin’s political activities and the shooting before the editorial was published. During cross-examination, a lawyer for Ms. Palin, Ken Turkel, brought up that Mr. Bennet’s brother, Michael Bennet, was a Democratic senator in Colorado. Ms. Palin’s lawyers declined to comment after the hearing.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: Editor Says He Didn’t Intend To Blame Palin for Shooting. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT