New York Times loses defamation suit, ordered to pay $9.25M to former Alabama basketball player

The New York Times was defeated in a defamation lawsuit Thursday brought by a former college basketball player and ordered to pay millions in damages.

An Alabama jury ruled the Times defamed Kai Spears, then an 18-year-old freshman walk-on basketball player for the University of Alabama's Crimson Tide, who was swept up in a 2023 report linking him to a fatal shooting.

After a nine-day trial, the eight-person jury determined that Spears was owed $9.25 million in damages.

ISRAELI PM NETANYAHU INITIATING DEFAMATION LAWSUIT AGAINST NEW YORK TIMES OVER CONTROVERSIAL ‘DOG RAPE’ STORY Spears was mentioned in the March 2023 report authored by New York Times sportswriter Billy Witz.

Spears was falsely identified as being a passenger in the car at the site of a January 2023 shooting that resulted in the death of 23-year-old Jamea Harris.

The Times issued a lengthy editor's note to the report in June 2023, but only after Spears filed the defamation lawsuit at the U.S.

District Court for the Northern District of Alabama.

"The original version of this article, published March 15, misidentified the person who was in the car with [Crimson Tide star player] Brandon Miller when the shooting occurred," the note began .

"Based on information from a person familiar with the case, the article erroneously identified that person as Kai Spears, a freshman basketball player.

After the article was initially published, Alabama’s athletic director and Spears’s father denied that Spears was present.

The Times included those responses and reviewed its reporting, but did not conclude that any other change to the article was warranted at that time.

"On Wednesday, Spears filed a defamation suit against The Times that included new details about the incident.

Based on that information, editors assigned further reporting, which determined that the other person at the scene was not Spears but Cooper Lee, a student manager for the team.

The Times regrets the error in the initial report." JURY FINDS CNN COMMITTED DEFAMATION AGAINST NAVY VETERAN, SETTLEMENT REACHED IN PUNITIVE DAMAGES Witz, who began reporting for The Times in 2008, relied on one anonymous source who claimed Spears was at the site of the shooting.