How the New York Times Lost a Defamation Suit for the First Time in Over 50 Years

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we look at an Alabama basketball player’s successful defamation lawsuit against the New York Times, and we cover more media misses.

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Jury Awards $9.25 Million in Defamation Suit Against NYT

For the first time in more than 50 years, the New York Times has lost a defamation lawsuit brought in the United States.

A jury awarded University of Alabama basketball player Kai Spears $9.25 million in damages last week after finding that the paper defamed him when it incorrectly reported that he was at the scene of a deadly shooting.

Spears sued the paper in 2023, accusing it of libel and “false light” invasion of privacy over a March 2023 article that falsely reported that, two months earlier, he was a passenger in a car at a shooting that left a 23-year-old mother dead. Three Alabama basketball players were present at the scene, including one player who was charged with capital murder and is awaiting trial. However, the other two were not accused of any wrongdoing.

The New York Times says it is “disappointed the jury found The Times liable for an honest mistake.”

“We thank the jury for its service, but believe the verdict and award of damages are contrary to law and not supported by the evidence,” spokesman Charlie Stadtlander said in a statement, adding that the paper is reviewing its legal options.

However, the trial revealed that the reporter’s anonymous sourcing resembled a game of telephone and didn’t comply with the storied paper’s strict policies and standards.

Rushing to publish the story on the eve of Alabama’s first NCAA tournament game, reporter Billy Witz pushed forward with a narrative placing the then-18-year-old freshman at the scene, despite his main source having not witnessed the shooting firsthand.

Before running the story, “A Fourth Alabama Player Was at a Deadly Shooting, in a Car Hit by Bullets,” Witz met with Source A, whom he has described as a high-level professional with access to investigative materials such as surveillance video, impound-lot photos, and a preliminary hearing transcript.

Source A claimed that Spears was the previously unidentified passenger in the car — based at least in part on information from his or her own unidentified source.

Witz was never in touch with Source A’s source.

Another source, Source B, told Witz that a “white guy on the basketball team” was in the car, though that source did not remember the player’s name.

Witz did reach out to Spears for comment, but the college freshman declined, having been instructed by the university not to discuss the case with the media. The reporter then got in touch with Spears’s father, who “unequivocally” denied that his son was a passenger in the car that night.

Spears would later explain that he was out that night with some of his teammates but had returned to his dorm by the time of the shooting.

After the story was published, the narrative quickly began to fall apart. Source B reached out to Witz to express doubts about the information he or she had provided.

The Times, for its part, argued during the trial that the article was not defamatory because it did not suggest Spears had any involvement in the shooting, despite falsely placing him at the scene. The paper’s lawyers also argued that Witz had taken reasonable steps to confirm his anonymous sources’ claims.

But Spears’s Tuscaloosa-based attorney, Matt Glover, told NR that the Times “had no corroboration, no verification, created an artificial deadline, and was willing to chase that headline at the expense of a child.”

He claimed that the national media have operated as if they have blanket immunity to defamation suits since the Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling in New York v. Sullivan in 1964. The ruling requires public figures suing for defamation to prove “actual malice,” a standard that applies when the defendant publishes a statement with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard for whether it’s true.

“When you have that false sense of ‘we can do anything we want,’ then you don’t have to follow your policies as much in your mind,” he said.

It probably didn’t hurt Glover’s cause that the jury was composed of Alabamians. President Trump, who won Alabama by more than 30 points, built his political career on attacking the liberal media, a group that the Times represents perhaps more than any other outlet.

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But Glover says a major difference between this case and others the Times has successfully defeated is that his client was a private citizen, not a public figure.

“It takes a lot of resources to go up against [the New York Times],” he said. “They have a very robust legal team, unlimited resources.”

He said the nine-day trial before an eight-person jury “really exposed the inner workings of the New York Times.”

After deliberating for five hours, the jury awarded Spears $7.4 million in punitive damages on the false-light claim.

Glover said that he is a “firm believer in the First Amendment” and that he thinks the media “has an important function,” but that those protections must be balanced with the rights of citizens, “whether you’re the president of the United States, or you’re a college student.”

Headline Fail of the Week

The Guardian claims that “the real covid-19 scandal is still unfolding” — and it’s not related to the virus’s origins or the corresponding cover-up.

Instead, the column criticizes Republicans for focusing too much on uncovering Dr. Anthony Fauci’s Covid-related lies and says that lawmakers should be focusing more on figuring out why so many Americans died, relative to the numbers who succumbed to the virus in other rich countries.

The column laments that a recent Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing “focused instead on the usual obsessions for which Dr Fauci has become the Republican scapegoat—some absurd and others valid but distantly related, at best, to protecting potential victims of a future plague.”

“Fauci, who is 85, was reduced to repeatedly invoking the Fifth Amendment, including when asked the colour of his tie,” the magazine adds. “In his opening statement, his hands shaking as he read it, Dr Fauci said his lawyers had advised that recourse because the committee’s chairman, Rand Paul of Kentucky, had made clear an intent to see him behind bars despite a blanket pardon issued by Mr Biden. In other words the Senate could not inquire into a health crisis that racked the country because a key witness feared a perjury trap, and rightly so.”

While the column ultimately gets around to acknowledging vaguely that Fauci “made mistakes, including not disclosing early on that some top virologists initially worried the virus might be man-made,” it argues that Fauci was not responsible for the worst excesses of the Covid response.

“His summons before the Senate committee was surely intended to humiliate if not incriminate him. It should embarrass the entire country,” the column concludes.

Media Misses

• The Washington Post must rehire opinion columnist Karen Attiah, whom it fired last year over her social media posts about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Private arbitrator Sarah Miller Espinosa ordered the paper to both rehire Attiah and to compensate her with back pay. The arbitrator said in her decision that the paper “did not have good and sufficient cause” to fire Attiah and “violated” its labor agreement, according to a copy of the order obtained by the New York Times.

• CNN host Christiane Amanpour recently claimed on her podcast that the migrant crisis in Spain is a “very tricky one” and that “invasion” is a “bad word to use” after 60,000 African migrants breached the border of the Spanish territory of Ceuta in 24 hours last month.

“And this time with the Ceuta ‘invasion,’ although that’s a bad word to use, clearly it has political context and is used by, you know, generally the far-right and the opponents of immigration,” she said. “All the European leaders, many of them really got on the case of the Spanish Prime Minister to get this situation under control. And it’s a very tricky one. And it has the possibility of empowering, for instance, in Spain, the far-right, the opposition, and elsewhere, you know, in Germany and France where there’s real fears that the far right may make inroads.” While most of the migrants were quickly returned, the wave briefly overwhelmed the territory, which itself has a population of just 85,000.

Businesses in Ceuta were forced to close their doors amid what residents called a migrant “apocalypse.” Migrants were seen sleeping in the streets and bathing in public fountains.

• New York magazine created widespread confusion and amusement on social media last week with a post that made little sense: