Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor who largely disappeared from the public eye after becoming Senator John McCain’s running mate in 2008 and propelling the Tea Party movement in the early years of the Obama administration, will take the stand Thursday. her libel lawsuit against DailyExpertNews.
Her return to the national spotlight — in federal court in lower Manhattan, where she’s expected to testify about the ways she felt vilified by an editorial published by The Times in 2017 — is in many ways befitting for a political figure long showed an instinct for attacking powerful people and institutions.
Although former President Donald J. Trump regularly attacked the media by calling them the “enemy of the people” and “fake news,” it was Ms. Palin who memorably got there first, captivated and antagonized a mainstream press who accused her. from asking questions” of her and begging to “stop making things up.”
That was in 2008 and 2009 when she was the Republican Party’s biggest star and widely regarded as a future presidential candidate, although she never ran.
Ms. Palin took the stand Wednesday, but as late afternoon approached, Judge Jed S. suspended Rakoff for the day after her attorney questioned her for about 15 minutes, citing only biographical points about her political career and life in Alaska.
Ms. Palin explained that she now spent most of her time in her hometown of Wasilla, Alaska, where she “maintained the fortress” as a single mother raising a child with special needs. Her lawsuit alleges The Times acted recklessly in writing and publishing the 2017 editorial that falsely linked a mass shooting in Arizona to her political rhetoric. The Times corrected the article the morning after it was published.
Most of Wednesday’s proceedings were taken up by the second and final day of testimony from James Bennet, the former editor of the opinion section of The Times, who is also named as a defendant in Ms Palin’s lawsuit.
Mr. Bennet, under questioning a lawyer for The Times, said he never intended to blame Ms. Palin for the 2011 mass shooting outside Tucson, Arizona, in which Gabrielle Giffords, then a Democratic congressman, was injured and six others. left behind. dead.
Bennet said his use of the phrase “the link to political incitement was obvious” – which he inserted into the editorial as he edited it – was intended as a criticism of the overheated political rhetoric of the time.
Mr Bennet testified that when he saw a deluge of criticism on social media, he thought “the lead article was being read in a way we didn’t intend.”
The lawyers of Mrs. Palin also called on Ross Douthat, a Times columnist who wrote to Mr Bennet around 11 a.m. on the night the editorial was published, expressing his “bewilderment” at the reference to Ms. palin. Mr Douthat testified that while he knew that the Tucson shooting hadn’t been linked to Ms. Palin’s political rhetoric, he understood that others at the time believed there was a link.