Sarah Palin’s lawyers plan to call a former Times editorial page editor in her libel trial.
Sarah Palin’s lawyers plan on Tuesday to call to the stand the former New York Times editor who oversaw the publication of an editorial in 2017 that incorrectly linked her with a mass shooting.
The decisions made by the editor, James Bennet, are at the heart of Ms. Palin’s libel lawsuit against The Times, which went to trial last week. The case is unusual because most libel suits against The Times are dismissed before they ever reach a jury.
Over three days of testimony so far, the inner workings of The Times’s writing and editing process have been reviewed with a level of detail that has been exhaustive and, at times, unflattering to the paper.
Mr. Bennet will be the highest-level Times journalist to be grilled by Ms. Palin’s lawyers
. Her lawyers are trying to convince the jury that he and The Times acted with reckless disregard for the truth, the extremely high bar that the Supreme Court has set for public figures like Ms. Palin to win a defamation suit.
The former Alaska governor’s lawyers have showed the jury emails, article drafts and other internal documents meant to shed light on what the motivations of Times journalists were as they deliberated how to write the item in question — and in particular the two sentences that caused Ms. Palin to sue.
The Times has argued that it was an honest mistake, that it corrected the errors the morning after the editorial went online, and that Mr. Bennet would never knowingly or maliciously publish something he knew to be false about Ms. Palin.
Following the shooting at a congressional baseball practice in June 2017 that left Representative Steve Scalise, Republican of Louisiana, gravely wounded, The Times prepared an editorial that lamented the nation’s increasingly hostile political discourse. As Mr. Bennet was editing the piece before publication, he inserted an incorrect reference to a 2010 map from Ms. Palin’s political action committee that included illustrations of cross hairs over 20 Congressional districts held by Democrats.
Ms. Palin was criticized for glorifying violence when the map first went out as a fund-raising solicitation to her supporters. In his revision of the editorial, Mr. Bennet said the map had incited another mass shooting in Tucson, Ariz., in 2011 that critically injured another member of Congress, Gabrielle Giffords, and killed six others. In fact, that link was never established.
If Ms. Palin’s lawyers pursue the same line of inquiry as they have with other Times employees, Mr. Bennet is likely to face questions from lawyers trying to establish that he most likely knew there was no link between Ms. Palin and the Tucson massacre and that he waited an unreasonable amount of time before deciding to correct the editorial.
Lawyers representing The Times will have the opportunity to question Mr. Bennet once Ms. Palin’s lawyers are finished, probably no earlier than Wednesday.
