On Tuesday, news emerged that former Governor of Alaska and former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin is suing The New York Times for reportedly defaming her in an editorial published earlier in June. The Times said in a statement regarding the Palin suit that they have "not reviewed the claim yet but will defend against any claim vigorously.”
Palin claims that the paper defamed her in an editorial titled "America's Lethal Politics" that was published on June 14 and described a supposed link between gun violence and politics in the United States. Palin took issue with a part of the article that she claims linked her political action committee with political violence. The editorial's passage in question reads as follows:
Was this attack evidence of how vicious American politics has become? Probably. In 2011, Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl. At the time, we and others were sharply critical of the heated political rhetoric on the right. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map that showed the targeted electoral districts of Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs. But in that case no connection to the shooting was ever established.
The Times subsequently issued a correction to their editorial saying there was "no established link" between political rhetoric and the 2011 shooting of Gabrielle Giffords. The correction also noted that the editorial had incorrectly described the map distributed by the political action committee. It clarified that the map had featured electoral districts, not lawmakers themselves, under crosshairs.
However, Palin's lawsuit noted that she believes the Times' correction was insufficient, saying that the response “did not approach the degree of the retraction and apology necessary and warranted by The Times’s false assertion that Mrs. Palin incited murder.”
Palin's lawsuit was filed on Tuesday in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan. It further accuses theTimes of publishing "a statement about her that it knew to be false" and of publishing a correction that she believed was not sufficient to rectify "the falsehoods that the paper published." According to Fox News, Palin is seeking damages "in an amount that will be determined by a jury."
The New York Times published an article on Tuesday announcing the lawsuit, as well as issued the aforementioned statement via a spokesperson saying that it will "defend against the claim vigorously." The paper has not issued any further comment on the matter.
