Sarah Palin COVID-19 tests delay libel trial against NY Times

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NEW YORK (AP) — An unvaccinated former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin tested positive for COVID-19 Monday, forcing a postponement of a trial in her libel lawsuit against The New York Times.

The Republican’s positive test was announced in court just as jury selection was set to begin at a federal courthouse in New York City.

Palin claims the Times damaged her reputation with an opinion piece penned by its editorial board that falsely asserted her political rhetoric helped incite the 2011 shooting of then-Arizona U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords. The newspaper has conceded the initial wording of the editorial was flawed, but not in an intentional or reckless way that made it libelous.

U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff said the trial can begin Feb. 3 if Palin, 57, has recovered by then.

Palin, a one-time Republican vice presidential nominee, has had COVID-19 before. She’s urged people not to get vaccinated, telling an audience in Arizona last month that “it will be over my dead body that I’ll have to get a shot.”

When he first announced that Palin had gotten a positive result from an at-home test, Rakoff said: “She is, of course, unvaccinated.”

Additional tests in the morning also came out positive, Palin’s lawyer told the court.

“Since she has tested positive three times, I’m going to assume she’s positive,” the judge said.

Rakoff said that courthouse rules would permit her to return to court Feb. 3, even if she still tests positive, as long as she has no symptoms. If she does have symptoms, she can be looked at on Feb. 2 by a doctor who provides services to the courts, he said.

On Saturday, Shawn McCreesh, a features writer for New York Magazine tweeted that Palin was seen at Elio’s restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and he quipped in a follow-up tweet: “My mom thought she was Tina Fey.” Fey was widely praised for her portrayal of Palin on Saturday Night Live when Palin was campaigning for vice president in 2008.

Luca Guaitolini, a restaurant manager, confirmed she had slipped through vaccination checks and dined at the restaurant known for attracting famous customers in violation of the city’s rule that restaurant guests must prove vaccination to be served. He said the restaurant was not making further statements.

“We’re just doing our thing,” he said.

Palin’s case survived an initial dismissal that was reversed on appeal in 2019, setting the stage for a rare instance that a major news organization will have to defend itself before a jury in a libel case involving a major public figure.

It’s presumed that Palin will be the star witness in the civil case. She’s seeking unspecified damages, saying the Times hurt her budding career as a political commentator.

Palin sued the Times in 2017, citing the editorial about gun control published after Louisiana U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise, also a Republican, was wounded when a man with a history of anti-GOP activity opened fire on a Congressional baseball team practice in Washington.

In the editorial, the Times wrote that, before the 2011 mass shooting that severely wounded Giffords and killed six others, Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of electoral districts that put Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized crosshairs.

In a correction two days later, The Times said the editorial had “incorrectly stated that a link existed between political rhetoric and the 2011 shooting” and that it had “incorrectly described” the map.

The disputed wording had been added to the editorial by James Bennet, then the editorial page editor. At trial, a jury would have to decide whether he acted with “actual malice,” meaning that he knew what he wrote was false, or with “reckless disregard” for the truth.

In pretrial testimony, Bennet cited deadline pressures as he explained that he did not personally research the information about Palin’s political action committee before approving the editorial’s publication. He said he believed the editorial was accurate when it was published.

Associated Press Writer Larry Neumeister contributed to this story

Parents Struggle to Explain to Children Who Sarah Palin Was

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (The Borowitz Report)—As Sarah Palin makes headlines after an absence of many years, American parents are struggling to explain to their children who the former politician was.

Harland Dorrinson, a pediatric psychologist, said that children may hear upsetting information about Palin at school and then seek reassurance from their parents.

“Although Sarah Palin is largely forgotten, parents shouldn’t pretend that she never existed,” Dorrinson said. “Talking about Sarah Palin is one of those difficult conversations parents need to have with their kids.”

“Children are learning that Sarah Palin was on the national ticket of a major political party that deemed her fit to assume the Presidency,” the psychologist said. “It’s only natural for kids to wonder, ‘How could this have happened?’ ”

Dorrinson advises parents to watch YouTube clips of Palin along with their kids, rather than let children discover them on their own, “which could be upsetting.”

“Watching the wrong Sarah Palin clip could be traumatic for children,” he said. “You don’t want them stumbling onto the Katie Couric interview.”

Who is Sarah Palin?

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FORMER Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, served as the vice president nominee for John McCain in the 2008 presidential election.

The mother of five is also known as an author and television personality.

2 Sarah Palin is an American politician

Who is Sarah Palin?

Born on February 11, 1964, Sarah Palin originally hails from Idaho.

When she was still a baby, her family moved to Alaska.

After attending Wasilla High School, Palin went on to attend college in Hawaii. She first enrolled at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, but soon after transferred to Hawaii Pacific University in Honolulu.

The following year, she transferred to North Idaho College, before spending time at the University of Idaho.

She spent a year at Matanuska-Susitna College in Alaska, before returning to the University of Idaho to graduate with her Bachelor’s degree in communications: journalism, in May of 1987.

While still in school, Palin won the Miss Wasilla beauty pageant in 1984. The same year, she placed third in the Miss Alaska pageant, earning the title of Miss Congeniality.

Post-graduation, Palin began working as a sports broadcaster for local news stations in Anchorage.

When did Sarah Palin get started in politics?

After officially registering as a Republican in 1982, Sarah Palin was elected to the Wasilla City Council in 1992.

In 1996, she was elected Mayor of Wasilla.

Palin became Alaska’s first female governor in 2006, the youngest in Alaskan history - she was 42 at the time.

She was asked to join John McCain on his presidential election run in 2008, to which she agreed.

On July 3, 2009, Palin announced she would not be running for reelection as governor the following year.

Since then, she has remained active in politics but has not tried for office, although she has hinted at both presidential and Senate runs.

Is Sarah Palin married?

On August 29, 1988, Palin and her high school sweetheart, Todd Palin, eloped.

The two gave birth to their first child, Track Charles James, in April of 1989.

In 1990, they welcomed their first daughter: Bristol Sheeran Marie.

Willow Bianca Faye was born in 1994, and Piper Indy Grace in 2001.

Their youngest, Trig Paxson Van, was born in 2008.

In August of 2019, Todd filed for divorce from Palin, citing “incompatibility of temperament.”

A few months later, in March of 2020, their divorce was finalized - Todd requested equal division of debts and assets, as well as joint custody of Trig.

2 Sarah Palin has released multiple books Credit: Getty Images - Getty

What is Sarah Palin’s net worth?

According to Celebrity Net Worth, Sarah Palin has an estimated net worth of around $8million.

The outlet estimates her annual salary to be around $1million.

Aside from her political career, Palin has appeared on television regularly.

She became the host of two shows: Sarah Palin’s Alaska, and Amazing America with Sarah Palin.

Her own network, the Sarah Palin Channel, was launched in 2014, but shut down the following year.

In March of 2020, Palin competed in the third season of The Masked Singer as Bear.

Palin’s book, Going Rogue, has sold millions of copies worldwide.

Her second book, America by Heart, came out in 2010.

Sarah Palin Postpones Court Date by Contracting COVID

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She’s back (well, almost). Photo: AP/Shutterstock

On Monday morning, numerous journalists arrived at a Manhattan federal courthouse for a trial that could easily gut press freedoms in America: Sarah Palin versus the New York Times.

In 2017, the former Alaska governor and reality-show contestant filed a defamation lawsuit against the paper over an editorial titled “America’s Lethal Politics.” The editorial misleadingly tied ads from her political action committee to the 2011 attack on Representative Gabby Giffords in Tucson, Arizona, and was published shortly after a gunman attacked Republican politicians in Virginia, gravely wounding Representative Steve Scalise.

While the day’s proceedings should have set the stage for potentially watershed and long-awaited First Amendment discourse, things went off the rails immediately: Palin had tested positive for COVID-19, the court announced.

As such, she was not present, and jury selection did not start as planned.

“She is, of course, unvaccinated,” the judge, Jed Rakoff, told the court, noting that the result was from an at-home test. Rakoff said Palin would undergo retesting before he would decide whether to postpone the trial.

Palin has been in New York City since at least Saturday night, when she was seen dining indoors at Elio’s, the packed red-sauce joint on Second Avenue, at a circular table in the corner up front by the window. As she was visible from outside, people out front pestered a server to confirm whether it was Palin; it was. The restaurant is apparently casual about checking vaccination status: CNBC’s Brian Schwartz noted his vaccine card was not checked on his own recent visit.

Later this morning, lawyers for Palin and the Times returned to Rakoff’s courtroom; the space was virtually empty save the lawyers on the case and a few reporters.

There was more bad news.

“Judge, my client went to one of the centers,” one of Palin’s lawyers said. “There were a few people in front of her. She was confused by the PCR test.”

Explained the attorney: The center offered rapid and regular PCRs, but Palin thought they had only the latter. She was told this would take at least three days for results, which, given her trial, wasn’t really feasible.

So Palin went to another testing site down the road and took a rapid test. “It was an antigen test, but it’s positive.”

“Since she has apparently tested positive three times, I’m going to assume that she’s positive,” Rakoff said.

Then Rakoff pointed out a silver lining thanks to the CDC: “They have said that even if she continues to test positive, she can actually return to the court on February 3, provided she’s asymptomatic,” Rakoff said.

“I think the chances are reasonably good that we will start on February 3,” he said.

While leaving court shortly after this underwhelming proceeding, several of Palin’s lawyers declined to comment on the COVID-related developments.

“How is she feeling?” a New York Post reporter asked as they slowly made their way toward Centre Street. “Does she have any symptoms?” The lawyers kept walking.

Additional reporting by Shawn McCreesh.

Sarah Palin tests positive for COVID, delaying trial against ‘New York Times’

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Updated January 24, 2022 at 2:35 PM ET

Sarah Palin’s defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, scheduled to open Monday, was pushed back until at least Feb. 3 after her attorneys informed the presiding judge that she tested positive for COVID-19.

U.S. District Court Judge Jed Rakoff informed those in attendance Monday morning that the Republican former governor and vice presidential candidate had tested positive.

“She is, of course, not vaccinated,” Rakoff said. Late last year, Palin said she would be vaccinated against COVID-19 only “over my dead body.”

A second test after an hour’s recess offered another positive result Monday morning, persuading Rakoff to put the trial’s start off despite concerns from the newspaper’s legal teams that it was one more delay in a case that was filed more than four years ago.

Before doing so, however, Rakoff issued a few rulings that seemed to favor The Times. He disqualified an expert witness Palin’s attorneys had proposed to call and said jurors would not hear about the details under which former Times editorial page editor James Bennet was forced to leave. Bennet departed under duress in 2020, several years after the editorial that prompted this suit.

As Palin’s political career first unfurled on the national scene in 2008, she frequently criticized what she called the “lamestream media,” saying it was unfair to her and took pains to cast her in the worst possible light.

Once the trial starts back up, Palin will get her day in court against The Times, one of the most august titles in American journalism. The case pits First Amendment protections for robust free speech against the right of someone not to be defamed, that is, the right not to have damaging and untrue claims made publicly against her, even if she’s a prominent public figure. It is also likely to shine an unwanted light into the behavior of the nation’s leading newspaper when it’s under deadline pressure.

“It’s going to be ugly,” says Lucy Dalglish, a First Amendment attorney who is dean of the University of Maryland Merrill College of Journalism. If you’re a news outlet, Dalglish says, “you really never want a libel case to go to trial. It’s hard to win. It can be done, but they’re hard to win.”

There is no argument or ambiguity here about the facts: What the Times originally published was wrong.

The case centers on a June 2017 editorial that wrongly asserted a link between an ad made by Palin’s political action committee six years earlier and a 2011 mass shooting in Arizona, in which six people were killed and several others wounded, including Democratic Congresswoman Gabby Giffords.

Editorial writer Elizabeth Williamson drafted the piece the day of another mass shooting, this time at a congressional baseball practice outside Washington, D.C. A man who was a supporter of liberal causes seriously wounded U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise, a top Republican from Louisiana, and injured five others.

Opinion editor added passages to editorial

Williamson’s boss, then-Times editorial page editor James Bennet, sought a more sweeping editorial, one that argued for greater gun control laws and against the use of heated political rhetoric and incitement, as he explained in a deposition later on.

So Bennet added a passage to the editorial saying that “the link to political incitement was clear” between Palin’s ads and the shooting in Tucson, Ariz. In fact, an ABC News story that the online version of the Times editorial linked to stated there was no proof that the gunman had seen the material from Palin’s political action committee.

Additionally, the editorial mischaracterized the Palin committee’s ad. The graphic showed crosshairs targeting 20 congressional districts, represented by Democrats, including Giffords’ in Arizona, on a map of the U.S. But it did not place crosshairs over images of the lawmakers themselves, as the Times originally suggested.

The newspaper posted the editorial, titled “America’s Lethal Politics,” the night of the Scalise shooting. Social media erupted. A columnist for the Times, Ross Douthat, alerted Bennet to the errors; Bennet texted Williamson, “The right is coming after us over the Giffords comparison. Do we have it right?” Both the writer and the editor took responsibility in a text exchange the next morning. Bennet wrote, “I feel lousy about this one — I just moved too fast. I’m sorry.”

The Times revised its stories, posted corrections and tweeted an austere apology the next day that did not mention Palin by name. Her attorneys called the tweets “half-hearted.” Days later, Palin filed suit.

Despite Times’ mistakes, Palin has a high bar to meet

“It’s going to be great courtroom theater,” says William Grueskin, a former top editor at the The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News who has written about the case for the Columbia Journalism Review. “You’re going to have Sarah Palin up there on the stand. You’re going to have some of the top people at the Times – at least of the opinion section. I don’t see how that can fail to be interesting.”

Palin’s attorneys have alleged that Bennet had demonstrated a desire to attack Palin — pointing to posts on The Atlantic’s site from years earlier, when Bennet was editor, by blogger Andrew Sullivan questioning details about the birth of her youngest child. Grueskin says he did not see anything in the court file to support that claim, noting Bennet’s swift public correction and private contrition.

Yet, Grueskin, now on the faculty of Columbia University’s journalism school, notes that the idea Palin had inspired the shooter in Arizona had been examined and discounted years earlier — including in the pages of the Times.

To prevail in court, Palin must convince the jury that Bennet and the Times acted with actual malice — that is, they knew what they wrote in the editorial was false or that they recklessly disregarded whether the claims were true or not. That standard emerged from a landmark 1964 Supreme Court ruling, also involving The New York Times.

“In our view, this was an honest mistake,” David McCraw, the Times’ deputy general counsel, told The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple in 2019. “It was not an exhibit of actual malice.”

Typically, misstatements about a well-known person, especially someone holding senior political office, are given greater protection under the law than those about private individuals. And the trial judge, Jed Rakoff, initially dismissed Palin’s suit, saying she hadn’t adequately alleged a cause of action. She appealed, and the appellate court sent it back to him to review once more. Under the new instructions, the case moved forward.

“Ordinarily, it’s very tough to libel a public official or a public figure,” Dalglish says. “When you’re dealing with a libel case that involves something that is supposed to be an opinion piece, things can tend to get messy.”

Proving harm vs. sending a message

Attorneys for the Times had sought to bar any discussion in court of the other controversies that surrounded Bennet in his four years as editorial page editor.

In his relatively brief tenure, Bennet was slammed by critics on the left and the right for his choice of writers to hire and pieces to publish as he sought to expand the range of voices in the paper’s largely liberal pages. Bennet left in June 2020 after acknowledging he had failed to read an op-ed by Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton before publication that sparked an outcry inside the paper’s newsroom. Cotton had called on then-President Donald Trump to use the military to put down social justice protests that got out of hand. Publisher A.G. Sulzberger noted it was one of several controversies under Bennet.

After leaving public office, Palin has stayed in the public eye, on television reality shows as well as serving as a Fox News commentator. The network hired her twice but parted ways with Palin in 2015 — years before the New York Times editorial was published.

Her attorneys are seeking to preclude any talk of her 2020 appearance on the Fox TV show The Masked Singer, which included a segment in which she rapped. (Audience members audibly gasped when Palin pulled the head off her colorful furry bear costume to reveal her identity.)

The former governor is asking for actual and punitive damages. But she may find it tough to prove actual harm or any specific lost revenues due to the editorial. Her lawyers have called on the court to deliver a message to the Times and to journalists that they cannot unfairly malign people, even if they are public figures.

It’s a message that could find a warm reception in at least one wing of the nation’s highest court: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has indicated he wants to toss the 1964 ruling setting a high bar for proving defamation claims. Justice Neil Gorsuch has argued in favor of at minimum revisiting the ruling.

“This case could add more fuel for that fire,” Grueskin says.