Jury selected for retrial of Sarah Palin's New York Times defamation suit

NEW YORK, April 14 (Reuters) - A jury was selected on Monday for the retrial in Sarah Palin's lawsuit against the New York Times ( NYT ) for allegedly defaming the former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate in a 2017 editorial about gun control. Palin, 61, who was unsuccessful in her 2008 bid for the second-highest U.S. office alongside running mate John McCain, lost her first trial against the Times and former editorial page editor James Bennet in 2022. But the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan last August decided that the verdict was tainted by several rulings by the presiding judge, and ordered a retrial.

Opening statements are due to begin on Tuesday at 9:30 a.m. EDT (1330 GMT) before U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff in Manhattan.

The nine-person jury selected by Rakoff and lawyers for both sides includes five women and four men.

Palin sued the newspaper after it published an editorial on June 14, 2017, bearing the headline "America's Lethal Politics" that wrongly suggested she may have incited a January 2011 mass shooting in an Arizona parking lot in which six people were killed and U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords was gravely wounded. The Times quickly corrected the editorial and apologized.

Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander has said Palin's lawsuit concerned "a passing reference to an event in an editorial" that was not about her.

(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Noeleen Walder)