In a significant legal defeat, The New York Times has been ordered to compensate a former college basketball player for defamation, with damages amounting to millions, as decided on Thursday.
An Alabama jury concluded that the Times had defamed Kai Spears, who was just an 18-year-old freshman walk-on for the University of Alabama’s Crimson Tide when he was wrongly implicated in a 2023 investigative piece regarding a fatal shooting incident.
After deliberating for nine days, the eight-person jury awarded Spears $9.25 million in damages, recognizing the significant impact of the fallacious report on his life.
In the contentious March 2023 article, authored by New York Times sports journalist Billy Witz, Spears was erroneously named.
The report inaccurately alleged that Spears had been a passenger in a vehicle at the scene of a January 2023 shooting, which tragically 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 US 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.”
Witz, who began reporting for The Times in 2008, relied on one anonymous source who claimed Spears was at the site of the shooting.
Witz testified the source was a “high-level person, professional.”
“I think the way I was looking at it, Source A, by their job title and by virtue of their access to the transcript, videos and impound photos, was somebody who knew a lot about this case,” Witz said, according to a report from The Tuscaloosa Patch.
“In my mind, the story had a focus, and this tragedy, as bad as it was, could have been much worse.”
A separate anonymous source had told Witz, “I can tell you it’s a White guy on the basketball team, I just don’t remember his name,” according to Witz’s testimony.
According to The Patch, Witz ultimately conceded from the witness stand, “Yes, [the story] had a mistake, no question.”
The Times noted in its own report about the verdict that it had not lost a defamation lawsuit brought in the United States over one of its articles in more than 50 years.
“We’re disappointed the jury found The Times liable for an honest mistake,” a Times spokesperson told Fox News Digital. “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. We are reviewing our legal options.”
Spears’ legal team did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s requests for comment.