Sarah Palin remained skeptical after New York Times editor James Bennet issued a groveling, teary-eyed apology to the former Alaska governor in her ongoing defamation trial against The Gray Lady.
Palin, a former Republican nominee for vice president, sued the Times over a 2017 editorial she claimed harmed her reputation. In 2022, a jury rejected her claim, and a judge moved to dismiss the case. However, Palin was granted a retrial following an appeal.
James Bennet, an editor who played a significant role in publishing the piece, testified on Thursday.
“I blew it, you know,” Bennet said. “I made a mistake.”
Fighting back tears, he explained that he was “really upset, and I still am, obviously,” over the whole ordeal.
“I did, and I do apologize to Governor Palin for this mistake,” insisted Bennet.
DEFAMATION TRIAL: Former NYT opinion editor James Bennet tearfully apologized to Sarah Palin during testimony yesterday, admitting he “blew it” with a 2017 editorial falsely linking her PAC to a 2011 Arizona shooting. pic.twitter.com/2NvtE7sama
— Election Wizard (@ElectionWiz) April 18, 2025
Eight years after the column was published, Bennet was so distraught that a lawyer, according to the Associated Press, “brought him a box of tissues as he testified.”
Bennet was forced to resign as editor at the New York Times in 2020 for an unrelated incident.
The display appeared to sway the Judge in the case, as he told lawyers that the former Times Editorial Page editor had offered a “heartfelt” and “moving” apology to Palin.
Palin, though, wasn’t quite as impressed.
“Let’s see, how many years ago was the untruth?” she told reporters before heading to the airport.
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Palin’s legal team addressed the apology aspect in their opening statement in the defamation trial. Whereas Bennet now claims he “did” apologize to their client, Palin’s lawyers stated otherwise.
The New York Times has “not publicly or privately apologized to her,” her lawyer declared, according to Slate. “That’s why we’re here. That’s why we’re here.”
To recap, the Times column in question was an epic display of revisionist history, blaming Palin in an editorial for a mass shooting in Arizona in 2011. That conspiracy theory was debunked almost immediately after the fact, yet six years later, the Times revived it out of the blue.
The editorial sought to draw a parallel between a mass shooting that occurred during a practice session for the annual Congressional Baseball Game by a far-left Bernie Sanders supporter, and a shooting by the apolitical Jared Loughner, who shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and killed six others in an attack in Tucson.
In doing so, the Times revived a conspiracy theory asserting that ‘target maps’ used by Palin to focus on electoral districts led to the shooting.
“The link to political incitement was clear,” the column initially read. “Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.”
What the Times missed, however, was the fact that no link between Palin’s maps or political rhetoric of any kind and the shooting had ever been established.
The paper of record was forced to issue a correction after the outcry, but they still left the unrelated Palin information in the corrected version.
“At the time, we and others were sharply critical of the heated political rhetoric on the right,” the corrected version reads.
“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.”
Here’s the before and after of the two paragraphs from the @nytimes editorial pic.twitter.com/n8GJvHSl2C
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) June 15, 2017
There was no connection to their column on “lethal politics,” but they kept Palin’s name in there regardless. That’s not remorse, that’s a newspaper getting caught lying and still trying to make it seem like they were right to begin with.
The fact that they published a conspiracy theory that a cursory Google search would have shown as debunked easily proves the intent behind that editorial, if not the incompetence of their employees at the time.
