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Sarah Palin, Republican candidate for vice president of the United States in 2008 and former governor of Alaska, has tested positive for the coronavirus, when she was about to go to trial against “The New York Times”, which he accused of defamation.
Sarah Palin’s positive test result was announced Monday by the US District Judge Jed Rakoff in Manhattan, presiding over the case. Rakoff indicated that “Of course she’s not vaccinated,” referring to Palin.
Rakoff claimed that Sarah Palin’s positive result came from a home test that was less reliable than tests administered in court and required for trial.
Said Palin will undergo a new test on Monday morning, and that the results will determine whether the trial can continue on the same day or be delayed.
Palin, 57, has accused the Times and its former editorial page editor, James Bennet, of damaging her reputation in a June 14, 2017 editorial in which she was related to a 2011 mass shooting in Arizona in which six people were killed and U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords.
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The editorial, titled “America’s Lethal Politics,” was published after a shooting at baseball practice in Alexandria, Virginia, in which the U.S. representative was wounded. Steve Scalise, a prominent Republican from Louisiana.
He said that “the link with the political incitement was clear” between the 2011 shooting and a map distributed by the political action committee of Sarah Palin which put 20 Democrats, including Giffords, under “stylized crosses.”
The Times quickly corrected the editorial, saying it wrongly claimed that political rhetoric and the 2011 shooting were related, and Bennet has said that he did not mean to blame Sarah Palin.
But Palin asserted that the material in question fitted Bennett’s “preconceived narrative”, and that he was experienced enough to know what his words meant.
The trial is expected to last five days.