Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee, told a Manhattan jury on Monday that her profile “crashed” as a result of a 2017 editorial published by The New York Times.
Ms. Palin said the editorial, which wrongly linked an ad from her political action committee with inciting a mass shooting, had greatly damaged her reputation and was personally devastating.
“It just kicked the oomph right out of you,” she said.
Her testimony in federal court was part a yearslong legal battle over the editorial with The Times, which fixed the error and issued a correction the day after publication.
This is the second time Ms. Palin has stood before a jury in the case. A federal judge and a jury both ruled against her in 2022, but an appeals court overturned the decision and ordered a new trial.
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Closing arguments are expected on Tuesday, after which the nine jurors will begin deliberations.
While much of the evidence has been heard before in this case, it is seen as a test of the public’s views of press freedoms. Since the case was last heard, President Trump has returned to office and stepped up his attacks on the news media.
At the heart of the case is the editorial, published by The Times’s editorial board and headlined “America’s Lethal Politics.” It detailed an atmosphere of violent political language after a gunman, who was a supporter of Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont progressive, opened fire on a congressional baseball practice. The editorial mentioned the last time a member of Congress had been shot, in 2011 in Tucson, Ariz., when a gunman killed six people and injured many others, including Representative Gabby Giffords, an Arizona Democrat.
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