Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee, told a Manhattan jury on Monday that her profile “crashed” as a result of a 2017 editorial published by The New York Times.
Ms. Palin said the editorial, which wrongly linked an ad from her political action committee with inciting a mass shooting, had greatly damaged her reputation and was personally devastating.
“It just kicked the oomph right out of you,” she said.
Her testimony in federal court was part a yearslong legal battle over the editorial with The Times, which fixed the error and issued a correction the day after publication.
This is the second time Ms. Palin has stood before a jury in the case. A federal judge and a jury both ruled against her in 2022, but an appeals court overturned the decision and ordered a new trial.
Closing arguments are expected on Tuesday, after which the nine jurors will begin deliberations.
While much of the evidence has been heard before in this case, it is seen as a test of the public’s views of press freedoms. Since the case was last heard, President Trump has returned to office and stepped up his attacks on the news media.
At the heart of the case is the editorial, published by The Times’s editorial board and headlined “America’s Lethal Politics.” It detailed an atmosphere of violent political language after a gunman, who was a supporter of Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont progressive, opened fire on a congressional baseball practice. The editorial mentioned the last time a member of Congress had been shot, in 2011 in Tucson, Ariz., when a gunman killed six people and injured many others, including Representative Gabby Giffords, an Arizona Democrat.
The editorial incorrectly linked the map from Ms. Palin’s PAC, which had stylized cross hairs over Democratic congressional districts, with inciting the 2011 shooting.
On Monday, Ms. Palin said she had not asked The Times directly for a correction or a retraction, but had tagged the publication in a post on social media “so they would know they were obviously being asked to own up to their fake news.”
She said she had been criticized in 2011 for the map from her PAC, but likened the cross hairs to “target” emojis. When The Times’s editorial reignited scrutiny of the map, she felt, “Oh, no, here we go again, a hundredfold, a thousandfold,” she said. Ms. Palin said the correction published by The Times was insufficient because it did not name her or her PAC.
Ms. Palin testified that after she resigned from the governor’s office in 2009, she did paid speeches and signed with a speakers bureau. She appeared on reality-TV shows, including “Sarah Palin’s Alaska.” Ms. Palin said she also made videos on Cameo, an app where people can pay for celebrities and other well-known personalities to create personalized videos, at least “a few a week,” including one this past weekend.
Ms. Palin said her speaking engagements slowed down around 2016, though she later said her public profile really fell in 2017 after the editorial came out.
Under cross-examination by Felicia Ellsworth, a lawyer for The Times, Ms. Palin acknowledged that she had made a run for the House in 2022. Her campaign included an event with Mr. Trump, who was between his two terms as president, that drew a “big crowd,” Ms. Palin said.
She also acknowledged that she was not claiming in this case that she had lost any income and was not asking for financial damages. Ms. Palin also agreed that it made her popular among her supporters to stand up to traditional news outlets.
Last week, James Bennet, the former Times Opinion editor who was in charge of overseeing the department, testified that he was responsible for rewriting the passage about the map in the editorial that said “the link to political incitement was clear.”
He acknowledged that he had made an error, and that he had not intended for readers to directly link Ms. Palin’s PAC to the mass shooting.
“I blew it, you know,” Mr. Bennet told the jury. “I made a mistake.”
