Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin leaves Manhattan federal court, Tuesday, April 22, 2025, in New York (AP Photo/Larry Neumeister).
Former Republican governor of Alaska and onetime candidate for vice president Sarah Palin quietly walked away from her appeal of her second trial loss to the New York Times, bringing a nearly nine-year saga and defamation lawsuit to an end.
Palin”s first go-round at the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals went well, as the court ripped Senior U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff for the series of “major issues” that arose at the tail end of the first trial in 2022. The judge controversially ruled, on his own during jury deliberations, that no reasonable juror could find the Times and its former opinion editor James Bennet acted with actual malice when the 2017 editorial linked a “cross hairs” map “circulated” by Palin’s political action committee, SarahPAC, to the 2011 mass shooting in Arizona carried out by Jared Lee Loughner, who killed six people and “grievously wound[ed] Representative Gabby Giffords,” a Democrat and the wife of Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz.
While the original version of the editorial was corrected within 14 hours after publication, Palin embarked on a long and winding road to sue and challenge landmark defamation precedent, but she eventually reached a roadblock in the form of Rakoff and the jury.
Even though the jury decided on its own the next day that Palin didn’t make her case, it was revealed that several jurors got wind of Rakoff’s dismissal during deliberations through push alerts. On appeal, that called into question the “reliability” of the verdict, and thus a new trial was ordered, but without disqualifying the Bill Clinton-appointed judge from further presiding over the case. The 2nd Circuit believed Rakoff would “adhere to the principle of complete impartiality, and its appearance, in fulfilling his future judicial responsibilities in this case.”
At the time, Palin’s legal team saw it as a “significant step” toward holding the Times accountable through a retrial in which the question of actual malice — whether the Times’ error about the public figure was made with “knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard for whether it was true or false” — was left for solely the jury to decide.
In April 2025, a different jury found in favor of the Times with a not liable verdict, leading Rakoff to dismiss the case and then Palin’s return to the 2nd Circuit — this time without the same issues about the judge on appeal.
With a brief due on March 30 and without offering a reason, Palin has now agreed in a stipulation to withdraw the appeal “without costs or attorneys’ fees” but with the possibility of reinstating the case within a calendar month.
“The parties in the above-referenced case have filed a stipulation withdrawing this appeal pursuant to Local Rule 42.1. The stipulation is hereby ‘So Ordered,'” the court said Monday in an order from the clerk.
Law&Crime reached out to Palin attorney Shane Vogt for comment on why the case is ending now and in this way.
