Sarah Palin, former governor of Alaska and vice presidential candidate, is suing The New York Times for defamation.
At the center of her lawsuit is a June 14, 2017, Times editorial, which seemed to connect Palin’s own controversial “cross hairs” political ad with the 2011 shooting of former Arizona Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords, according to the New York Post.
The offending paragraph from the editorial, which was written about the recent Congressional baseball game shooting, reads:
“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 ended up running a correction two days later, admitting that there was no connection between the Palin ad and the shooting, and that the cross hairs weren’t in fact over the 20 Democrats faces but “electoral districts.”
“Mrs. Palin brings this action to hold the Times accountable for falsely stating to millions of people that she, a devoted wife, mother and grandmother, who committed a substantial portion of her adult life to public service, is part of a pattern of ’lethal’ politics and responsible for inciting an attack that seriously injured numerous people and killed six, including a nine-year-old girl who, at that time, was the same age as Mrs. Palin’s youngest daughter,” the court papers read.
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