Sarah Palin lost her defamation lawsuit today. You know what that means.

... poor bible spice, the tundra teabag barbie doll. all those years just haven't been kind ...

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

After just three hours of deliberation, a jury in New York on Tuesday found the New York Times not liable for defaming former Alaska governor and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

It is, in essence, the third time Palin has lost this particular case. In early 2022, she lost it two times in quick succession, first when U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff announced he would dismiss the case regardless of what the jury found, and second when the jury found the Times not liable.

But a three-judge panel on the 2^nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out both decisions in 2024, finding that Judge Rakoff had made a series of errors in the case. It was then retried this month, before the very same judge, and with largely the very same facts—except this time, the prosecution was allowed to introduce the detail that former New York Times editor James Bennet's brother is Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet, as well as articles published in the Atlantic from James Bennet's tenure there as editor in chief.

Throughout the trial, Judge Rakoff cracked jokes about the 2^nd Circuit's opinion. "I'm still bleeding from some of their comments," he told the court at the conclusion of evidence. With the jury out of the room, he seemed as unpersuaded as ever by the facts presented by Palin's team. Even so, "whether I think the 2^nd Circuit was right or wrong, I know well they are my boss," Judge Rakoff said from the bench, and he let the jury decide this time. Ultimately, the jurors seemed to agree with his assessment.

Palin, the final witness in the case, took the stand Monday in a shimmering and sequined silver blazer, where she testified to the 2017 editorial's impact on her life.

Cranking the folksiness up to 11, her accent and attitude were seemingly more pronounced than when I spoke to her in the court room last week. She claimed the editorial, which mentioned her PAC in the fifth paragraph and didn't otherwise get much traction, "just kicked the oomph right out of you." (Even her legal team seemed unconvinced. Her lawyer Ken Turkel, in his closing statement, told the jury that while Palin "may sound colloquial, may sound too country"— "may seem a little bouncy or whatever"—she was sincere in her pain.)

Palin otherwise used her time on the stand to chronicle her falling star in American politics, a long, slow decline after a meteoric ascent that saw her go from being the youngest person and the first woman to be elected governor of Alaska, at age 42, to the Republican vice presidential candidate just two years later. But after being on the losing side of the 2008 presidential election, Palin struggled to stick the landing. Pricey fights against various ethics investigations preceded her resignation from the Alaska governor's office in 2009.

From there, she moonlighted as a talking head, a bestselling author, and a keynote speaker, replete with a paid contract on Fox News. She was involved with—though the specifics of how, exactly, remain debated—the political action committee bearing her name: Sarah PAC.

But the Fox News contract eventually went away; her appearances on the network became fewer and unpaid. The keynote speeches became less frequent. Sarah PAC is no longer active. Palin, in essence, became more of an influencer, with sporadic speaking gigs and an online content mill. She went on The Masked Singer. A large part of her income now, she reported, comes from filming videos on Cameo, which she admitted to having filmed as recently as last weekend.

A liable verdict in the long-shot defamation case may have resolidified Palin's reputation in Republican politics. Conservatives have long sought an opportunity to overturn New York Times v. Sullivan, the landmark Supreme Court case that strongly limited the ability of a public official to sue for defamation. But in the three years since the first go-around of the Palin trial, conservatives have moved on. More recently, billionaire Trump donor and casino magnate Steve Wynn filed a libel lawsuit against the Associated Press, which seemed more promising than Palin's effort. But that, too, failed: The Supreme Court declined to hear it in March. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has found more promising inroads to make incursions against the press and the First Amendment.

Where Palin will go from here is not clear. Her 2022 run for Alaska's at-large congressional seat was also a multi-try failure; despite an endorsement from President Donald Trump, she lost in a special election and again in a general election in 2022 to Democrat Mary Peltola. With her finally on the sidelines in 2024, Republicans won the seat back.

"Taking on the traditional media made her popular in 2008 when she ran for vice president; it made her popular in 2022 when she ran for Congress," said Felicia Ellsworth, a lawyer for the New York Times. "And she's hoping it will do the same today."

It did not.

Palin has said publicly that she "would love to" take a position in the Trump administration. But as of February, according to News Nation, she "hasn't been contacted."