A judge has ruled that Sarah Palin’s libel lawsuit against The New York Times should be thrown out, but he will continue to let the jury deliberate until a verdict is reached, Politico reports.

U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff ruled on a motion filed by The Times that sought to get the case tossed by arguing Palin’s lawyers hadn’t provided enough evidence to support their defamation claim. While the judge agreed with The Times, even he acknowledged an appeal from the former Alaska governor was inevitable. Per reports, the jury does not know about Judge Rakoff’s decision, and they have been granted permission to continue deliberations until 5 p.m. ET today.

If a public figure is to succeed in a defamation case, as the Supreme Court ruled in the landmark 1964 case New York Times v. Sullivan, they must prove false statements were both defamatory and made with “actual malice.” In Palin’s case, Judge Rakoff ruled that her lawyers had not provided enough evidence to meet that standard.

Palin filed her lawsuit against the Times in 2017 after it published an op-ed, “America’s Lethal Politics,” that incorrectly linked ads from Palin’s political action committee to Jared Loughner’s 2011 attack on former U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords. The editorial originally claimed that the PAC had released advertisements that put “Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs”; it was later corrected to note that the crosshairs were just referring to electoral districts, not individual lawmakers.

Palin, however, claimed the editorial caused “anguish, humiliation, embarrassment and damage to her reputation.” To pursue her case, she enlisted the help of two lawyers who spearheaded Hulk Hogan’s Peter Thiel-funded invasion of privacy lawsuit that led to the end of the original Gawker. 

The trial began earlier this month, though only after a two-week delay caused by the unvaccinated Palin testing positive for Covid-19. The trial featured testimony from James Bennet, who was serving as the Times’ editorial page director at the time and was also named as a defendant in the lawsuit. While Elizabeth Williamson wrote the op-ed, Bennet testified that he was the one who edited the piece and added the lines about the PAC; while Bennet admitted he made a mistake, he claimed he did not act out of “actual malice.”

This story is developing…

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