In Sarah Palin’s lawsuit against the New York Times, her lawyers are accusing the newsroom of a longstanding political vendetta against conservatives
Sarah Palin’s lawyer offered jurors a simple explanation Friday for why The New York Times used a 2017 editorial to link Palin to a deadly shooting in Arizona six years earlier: a long-standing political vendetta against conservatives.
By tying the case so directly to partisan politics, Turkel seemed to be taking a big risk with a jury that seems likely to lean liberal. Almost 87% of Manhattan voters who cast ballots in Nov. 2020 favored Joe Biden, while only about 12% backed President Donald Trump. The vote tallies in other areas the jury is drawn from were nearly as lopsided.
“What this dispute is about in its simplest form is really power and lack of power,” Turkel said. “An entity as large as The New York Times Company controls every aspect of this dialogue …. At the click of a button, someone’s accused of inciting murder.” In his closing argument to the jury after six days of testimony, Times attorney David Axelrod ridiculed the suggestion that the editorial’s reference to Palin’s political action committee was the product of political animus directed at the former governor. He said that would have required a conspiracy among as many as nine people to trash Palin.
“Sarah Palin’s name was in there as a descriptive measure,” Axelrod said. “It is a stretch to read that editorial in good faith and see that it calls Gov. Palin herself a murderer.”“It’s almost impossible for a reasonable person to read the statements that are being challenged here in the editorial without seeing them as clearly directed at Sarah Palin,” said the judge, an appointee of President Bill Clinton.
Axelrod said there was no way for Palin to meet that high burden in a case that clearly stemmed from language that was the product of an error. However, Palin’s attorney noted that on the day the editorial was published Bennet received articles that debunked the notion of any tie between Palin’s group. He then sent a couple of those on to a colleague by email. Bennet acknowledged on the stand that he must have looked at those stories, Turkel noted.
In fact, Turkel said Friday that Palin’s side would consider a verdict in her favor of just a dollar as a victory.
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