It’s hard for publications to lose these cases. The bar for proving malice is sky-high. And if you’re a public figure, forget about it. Well, for the first time in over 50 years, The New York Times will have to fork over potentially millions of dollars over a 2023 piece about a shooting involving basketball players from the University of Alabama that left a 23-year-old woman dead. Of course, the Times, bloated by ego, stood by its reporting. They were wrong, issuing an editor’s note. The piece details the whole saga, including the reporter’s error and the behind-the-scenes moves to verify the information. The thing is, the victim, Kai Spears, wasn’t near the shooting and wasn't involved. One thing that seems lost in the piece is a) the ever-degrading value of anonymous sources and b) that they ran with this based on one source.
Isn’t the standard to get multiple sources, at the very least two? They didn’t run the article and then decided to do that corroborating work. It’s the equivalent of reaching out to someone for comment on a hit piece, with the article going live in five minutes. It’s just a way for publications to say they reached out without actually expecting much. But wait, the Times reporter at the center of this fiasco, Billy Witz, tried to contact Spears personally. Yeah, buddy, you should’ve done that before going with some rando who said the person in the car at the time of the shooting was “a white guy on the basketball team.”
The Times’ legal team is calling this an honest mistake. Spears said he suffered emotional distress and death threats for even being mentioned as present when this heinous crime was committed (via NYT):
“The Times had not lost a defamation lawsuit brought in the United States over one of its articles in more than 50 years.”
— Josh Holmes (@HolmesJosh) August 21, 2026
Wow. https://t.co/C6MxzXoDW6
The eight-person jury awarded $9.25 million in damages, after a nine-day trial in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama.
Kai Spears, who played for the University of Alabama men’s basketball team, sued The Times in 2023, accusing it of libel and “false light” invasion of privacy. He claimed the article, which mistakenly reported he was a passenger in a car at the scene of the shooting, had caused him emotional distress and forever linked him with a murder. Three other basketball players from the school were present at the shooting, which killed a 23-year-old mother.
[…]
The jury deliberated for about five hours on Thursday. Because Alabama law caps jury awards in certain cases, the damages will be adjusted down by over $2 million.
[…]
The article at the center of Mr. Spears’s lawsuit was published on March 15, 2023, after coverage of a deadly January shooting at which three Alabama basketball players were present. (One player was charged with capital murder and awaits trial. Two others were not implicated in the shooting or accused of any wrongdoing.)
The article, by the reporter Billy Witz, said that Mr. Spears had also been present at the shooting, attributing the knowledge to a single anonymous source. The article said that Mr. Spears had declined to comment and that university officials had not immediately responded to a request for comment.
After publication, Mr. Spears’s father [athletic director at Marshall University] and the university’s athletic department [Greg Byrne] denied that Mr. Spears had been at the shooting. The article was updated with the denials, and The Times continued to stand behind its reporting.
Two months later, Mr. Spears sued The Times. In his complaint, he said he had been out that night with some of the players, but had been back at the Alabama athletes’ dorm by the time the shooting occurred. The lawsuit said The Times’s “false statements will be associated with him for the rest of his life,” and that he had endured mental anguish and death threats.
[…]
During the trial, lawyers for The Times argued that the article was not defamatory because it did not convey that Mr. Spears had been involved in the shooting, even if it incorrectly placed him at the scene. They also argued that Mr. Witz had taken reasonable steps to corroborate his source’s information, including approaching Mr. Spears in person.
Jurors were shown surveillance footage, dashcam footage and text messages that confirmed Mr. Spears was nearby in another car, but not at the scene. He testified that he was heckled at a game the day after the article was published and had been under so much stress that his grades slipped.
On the witness stand, Mr. Witz, the Times reporter, apologized to Mr. Spears. He said he had been confident in his source and had tried to confirm with other sources before talking to a person who told him that the car’s occupant was “a white guy on the basketball team.” That person did not recall the name.
Matt Glover, a lawyer representing Mr. Spears, told the jury in his closing argument that the case gave them “the opportunity today to change the way journalism works at The New York Times.”
[…]
Michael Bell, a lawyer for The Times, argued that Mr. Witz and The Times had published the article believing the information from the source was true, and that Mr. Witz had taken steps to verify it.
Well, obviously Witz and the Times are going to say they believed their single, anonymous, incorrect source who said there was a white guy from the team around the crime scene. You verify all this first, but the paper seems to have channeled a certain Hollywood celebrity and fired into the wind.
“There was a mistake, an honest mistake,” Mr. Bell said. Yeah, I don’t think so. This paper lies; they stood there smugly thinking their single, trash source was correct when it was dead wrong, and maybe they could’ve avoided this circus if they, you know, did their job. They didn’t. One source seldom cuts it, and that’s what’s striking. Some rando was the linchpin for this whole story, and Witz’s editors felt that was sufficient. Why?
If there’s anything we’ve learned since the days of Deep Throat, it’s that these sources were once considered credible because reporters did their job of corroborating what was disclosed. When things started to look like the dead zone of an ocean floor, maybe that’s when preliminary moves should’ve been made, no? Instead, it was the usual ‘we’re right, we’re the Times, we stand by our reporting,’ and then they got a sledgehammer to the face. It’s very satisfying.
There used to be honorable people in the profession. Overwhelmingly liberal, yes, but they took their work seriously and did so with a sense of pride and professionalism; it was severe malpractice to run with shoddy sources. That’s no longer the case, as you can see with the serial errors in covering the Trump presidency and the Russian collusion hoax being the mother lode of journalistic malpractice.
There was no accountability after that scandal, and so, here we are.
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