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Sarah Palin’s defamation trial against the New York Times was postponed Monday after the former vice presidential candidate tested positive for COVID-19.
Palin tested positive on three rapid coronavirus tests, including once on Monday morning near the federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan where jury selection for the case was scheduled to take place, Judge Jed Rakoff said.
Rakoff raised Palin’s positive status in court Monday morning as her attorneys and lawyers for the New York Times hammered out logistics for the trial to move forward.
“She is, of course, unvaccinated,” Rakoff noted.
He then called an extended break in the hearing to give Palin time to get another rapid COVID test.
When they reconvened about an hour later, an attorney for Palin told Rakoff that she again tested positive.
Rakoff delayed the trial until next Thursday to give the former Alaska governor time to recover from the virus.
“I look forward to seeing you all, and Ms. Palin, on February 3rd,” he said.
Palin has railed against the COVID-19 vaccine in recent months, telling a conservative radio host that it would be “over my dead body that I’ll have to get a shot.”
“I will not do it. I won’t do it, and they better not touch my kids, either,” she told Charlie Kirk in December 2019.
Palin, a former GOP heavyweight, sued the New York Times in 2017 after it published an editorial that wrongly linked her political action committee to the 2011 mass shooting in Arizona.
In her suit, Palin claimed the Times defamed her when it “falsely stated as a matter of fact to millions of people that Mrs. Palin incited Jared Loughner’s January 8, 2011, shooting rampage at a political event in Tucson, Arizona, during which he shot nineteen people, severely wounding United States Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords …”
In a correction to the piece, the Times wrote the article “incorrectly described a map distributed by a political action committee before that shooting. It depicted electoral districts, not individual Democratic lawmakers, beneath stylized cross hairs.”
With Post wires
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