The Times Defamed Kai Spears. A Jury Found It.

The New York Times falsely identified Kai Spears as a passenger in a vehicle connected to a fatal shooting in Tuscaloosa.

That is what eight jurors in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama found on Thursday, after a nine-day trial and a defamation suit filed in 2023. Damages: $9.25 million.

Here is the Times’s position, and it is not nothing. The story was about a fatal shooting — a matter of evident public concern, where the public has a legitimate interest in knowing what the investigation has established. Anonymous sources are sometimes the only way to report on active criminal investigations, on matters that would otherwise expose a source to retaliation or to the kind of public second-guessing that an open justice system otherwise relies on. The First Amendment exists in significant part to protect this kind of reporting. New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 279 (1964), is the constitutional anchor that allows the press to publish claims that public officials and institutions would prefer suppressed. The Times corrected within days of learning the report was wrong. That is the response a serious paper makes when it gets something wrong.

Here is what the audit shows.

The Times named Kai Spears — a University of Alabama men’s basketball player — by name, with the implication that he had been a passenger in a car that figured in a fatal shooting, on the word of a single source whose identity the Times has not disclosed and whose basis for the claim the Times did not document in any way the public record shows. The framing — “a person familiar with the investigation, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters” — is the credential the source carried into the story. It is not a verification standard. No on-record confirmation, no document, no second source, no response from Spears before publication. The ritual of the formulation signaled that the work had been done; the public record shows no evidence that it had. A college athlete’s name, attached to a fatal shooting, in a publication with the Times’s reach, is the kind of claim that required the Times to do the work the Times did not do.

The Times corrected after the harm was done. The correction is not the verification that should have preceded the publication. The story ran. The name attached. The reputation moved. The correction arrived after.

The harm is to a college athlete whose name was attached to a fatal shooting in a publication with the Times’s reach. That name is now searchable. It appears in coverage of the lawsuit. It will appear in any future search for the fatal shooting. The correction does not remove the name from the original story’s index. The verdict compensates, in money, for what the Times’s reporting took from Spears in reputation. The compensation is not the same as the restoration of the name.

The Sullivan framework is the doctrinal anchor the verdict sits inside. The Times was the publisher-defendant in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964) — the case L.B. Sullivan, an Alabama police commissioner, brought after the Times published an advertisement critical of the Montgomery police. The Times won. The actual-malice standard the Court built — knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth — exists to enable aggressive accountability journalism on matters of public concern, not to insulate papers from the consequences of putting a college athlete’s name in a fatal-shooting story without basic verification. The jury in Tuscaloosa found the Times published the name with knowledge of its falsity or reckless disregard for the truth, the standard Sullivan set for the press to meet when it names a person in print. The $9.25 million is what the line costs.

The same Sullivan framework that protects the press from political pressure has, this year, also thrown out a $3.8 billion suit against the Washington Post for failing to clear the actual-malice threshold. Major plaintiffs who cannot meet the standard lose. Outlets that publish recklessly pay. The system working as designed, at the cost the institution pays when the work is not done.

The Times’s institutional practice is worth pausing on here. The “person familiar with the investigation, speaking on the condition of anonymity” formulation is the boilerplate that lets major outlets publish claims that would not survive standard fact-checking if the source’s identity were on the record. The ritual signals to readers that the source has standing to know. The ritual does not tell readers what verification was done. The Times’s readers — and the people whose names appear in Times stories — trust that the institution has done the work. When the institution has not, the public correction arrives after the name has done its damage.

Anonymity is not armor. An unnamed source cannot be cross-examined. An editor’s note attached within days does not undo the harm of a misidentification on the first pass. A federal jury found the Times defamed Kai Spears and made the paper pay $9.25 million. His attorney, Matt Glover, said the verdict “will improve journalism throughout the country.” That is the institutional remedy the jury’s damages represent.