NEW YORK (Reuters) – Former U.S. vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin asked a U.S. court on Monday for a new trial after losing her defamation case against the New York Times earlier this month, and also requested that the judge overseeing the case be disqualified.
Palin’s attorneys said last week they would take those steps because several jurors received push notifications on their cellphones before deliberations were over about U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff’s decision to dismiss the case regardless of their verdict.
The jury rejected the Republican former Alaska governor’s argument that the newspaper and former editorial page editor defamed her in a June 2017 editorial that incorrectly linked her to a mass shooting in 2011 where six people died and then-congresswoman Gabby Giffords was seriously wounded. The article was corrected the next day.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
