Sarah Palin said she lost sleep after a 2017 New York Times editorial falsely linked an ad from her political action committee to a mass shooting years earlier. She has sued the paper for defamation.

Transcript

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

After a 4 1/2-year legal battle, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin got her day in court. She testified today in her defamation suit against The New York Times. It centers on an editorial that wrongly linked an ad from Palin's political action committee to a deadly shooting that left a Democratic congresswoman severely wounded.

NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik is covering the trial. Hi, David.

DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Hey, Ari.

SHAPIRO: What did Sarah Palin say in her testimony today?

FOLKENFLIK: Well, it's dramatic, right? Sarah Palin, former vice-presidential candidate with John McCain back in 2008 - this story really goes back to an ad that she did a couple years later, 2010. Her political action committee puts out an ad with crosshairs over the districts of more than a dozen Democratic lawmakers, including Gabby Gifford (ph) of Arizona, targeting them for defeat. The next year, a mass shooting gravely wounds Gabby Giffords. It kills six other people. And Palin was fending off charges of a connection at that time. No such link was ever established between her political committee's ad and the shooting.

Six years later, The New York Times writes a sweeping editorial after another shooting, of a Republican congressman in this case. The Times wrote that there was a clear link all those years earlier between her ad and the Giffords shooting and mistakenly made it seem as though the crosshairs were over lawmakers. Neither assertion was true.

Palin felt the editorial reignited that firestorm from years earlier. She saw it as a political attack. In her testimony, she called it a horrible tragedy, mortified that she was linked once more and said she found it hard to put head to pillow after reading it.

SHAPIRO: So what exactly is she trying to prove in this case?

FOLKENFLIK: Well, she's got a high bar, which the judge indicated to lawyers out of jurors' hearing several times during this trial. She's got to indicate that the Times acted, in a sense, with animus to try to harm her and to harm her reputation. And there's this standard called actual malice dating back to the '60s in a Supreme Court ruling involving The New York Times. That is that she has to prove the Times knew what they published was false or just didn't care; that is that they showed reckless disregard of the truth and should have known. And they particularly have been focusing on James Bennet, at that time the editorial page editor for the Times, who inserted the two incorrect claims into that editorial.

SHAPIRO: How did lawyers for The New York Times challenge her on the stand?

FOLKENFLIK: Well, they said, look, if you're so harmed, Sarah Palin, who did you talk to about the editorial? Did you talk to your parents after reading it? Sarah Palin said, no. Did you talk to your two sisters? Palin said, no. Her brothers? No. Did she say her children? Well, she had testified that she believes she never - or she didn't at that time talk to her kids about the editorial.

And they also asked, what was the harm done? Did you lose any jobs? Did you lose any revenue? Did friends turn on you? Did candidates say they no longer wanted your support? In each instance, she said no. She couldn't point to tangible harm, and that's an element, too.

The judge indicated subsequently to lawyers out of the jurors' hearings that he was pretty skeptical of the ability to prove that there was that animus driving James Bennet or that harm had been done, and that affects the way in which he'll let the lawyers make the case to jurors.

SHAPIRO: So after this significant day of testimony, what happens next in the trial?

FOLKENFLIK: Well, you're going to hear closing arguments tomorrow in the case. And what's expected is that jury deliberations will be taking place either late Friday afternoon or the beginning of the day on Monday.

SHAPIRO: That's NPR's David Folkenflik. Thanks, David.

FOLKENFLIK: You bet. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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