NYT Ordered To Pay Millions To College Athlete In Defamation Judgement

A federal jury on Thursday ordered The New York Times to pay a former University of Alabama men’s basketball player $9.25 million in damages for falsely reporting that he was at the scene of a murder in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. 

The Times falsely claimed in March 2023 that Kai Spears was in former Alabama basketball star Brandon Miller’s vehicle at the scene of a January 2023 shooting that killed 23-year-old Jamea Harris.

Spears was not in the vehicle. The passenger was Alabama basketball manager Cooper Lee.

The Times later added an editor’s note acknowledging that the original article had “erroneously identified” Spears as the passenger based on information from a person familiar with the case. The newspaper noted that Alabama’s athletic director and Spears’ father had denied that Spears was present after the article was initially published.

Spears sued the Times in 2023, accusing the newspaper of libel and “false light” invasion of privacy. He argued that the article caused him emotional distress and has permanently linked his name to the murder.

The eight-person federal jury in Alabama awarded Spears $9.25 million in damages Thursday following a nine-day trial in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama. Spears’s attorneys had asked jurors to award him $15 million.

The verdict marked the New York Times’s first loss in a U.S. defamation lawsuit over one of its articles in 50 years, according to the newspaper. 

During the trial, Times sportswriter Billy Witz, who wrote the 2023 article, apologized to Spears from the witness stand. Witz had relied on a confidential source for the erroneous information identifying Spears as the person in Miller’s vehicle.

Attorneys for the Times argued that the report was an honest error rather than defamation and said Witz had made significant efforts to verify his reporting.

“This is a case of an honest mistake,” an attorney for the Times told jurors during closing arguments Thursday.