NYT SMACKED: $9M Defamation Bomb

A jury in Alabama just did something that has not happened in more than 50 years — they made The New York Times pay for getting a story wrong.

Quick Take

A Tuscaloosa jury ordered the Times to pay former Alabama basketball player Kai Spears more than $9 million for defamation.
The paper’s 2023 article wrongly placed Spears in Brandon Miller’s car at the scene of a deadly shooting.
The Times issued a correction just two days after Spears sued, admitting the story “was not accurate.”
The verdict is the newspaper’s first defamation loss in over five decades, dating back to the landmark Sullivan case.

A Story That Named the Wrong Player

In March 2023, the Times published an article tying Spears to the fatal shooting near the University of Alabama campus that killed Jamea Harris. The story claimed Spears was in teammate Brandon Miller’s car when the shooting happened. Spears was an 18-year-old freshman walk-on at the time. Alabama’s athletic director and Spears’s own father publicly denied he was there, but the paper initially stood by its reporting.

New York Times loses defamation suit, ordered to pay $9.25M to former Alabama basketball player https://t.co/s60vuzIhAc #FoxNews

— Tina (@ThereIsN0Alt) August 21, 2026

Spears sued in 2023, accusing the Times of libel and false light. His complaint pointed to sworn statements and other evidence placing him somewhere else that night. Two days after the lawsuit landed, the Times reversed course. It issued a correction saying Spears was not in the car and identified the actual passenger as a student team manager named Cooper Lee. The paper called it an editorial error and said it regretted the mistake.

A federal judge later denied both sides’ requests to end the case before trial, ruling a jury could reasonably find Spears was never at the scene at all. That decision sent the dispute to a Tuscaloosa courtroom this August, more than three years after the original story ran.

A Reporter’s Apology From the Witness Stand

During trial testimony, Times reporter Billy Witz apologized directly to Spears. “I’d like to apologize for misidentifying you in the car,” he said. “That was a mistake and I want to own up to it and say I’m sorry”. That kind of admission, given under oath in front of a jury, is rare for a major news organization and likely shaped how jurors weighed the paper’s conduct.

The Times still argued its reporting was “substantially true” because Spears was involved in events leading up to the shooting, even if he was not physically present when it happened. Jurors were not persuaded. On a Thursday evening in August 2026, they sided with Spears and awarded him roughly $9.25 million in damages. Some early reports put the figure slightly higher, near $9.35 million, but the outcome was the same: a clear loss for the paper.

Why This Verdict Breaks a Half-Century Streak

Since the Supreme Court’s 1964 ruling in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, public figures suing news outlets have faced a steep hurdle called “actual malice.” A plaintiff must show the publisher knew a statement was false or recklessly ignored the truth, not just that it made a careless mistake. That standard has protected news organizations for generations, and mistaken identity alone typically does not meet it.

Spears’s case cleared that bar anyway, making this the Times’s first defamation defeat in more than 50 years. The Times has said the verdict is “contrary to law and not supported by the evidence” and is expected to appeal. Legal observers online have already flagged that an appeal is all but certain given the size of the award and the precedent at stake.

A Reminder That Accuracy Still Matters

For readers who have watched major outlets rush stories about young athletes and campus tragedies, this case lands as a warning shot. An 18-year-old kid got labeled as present at a murder scene, and it took a lawsuit to force a correction. Even a newsroom with a “longstanding policy of correcting errors,” as the Times described itself, waited until legal action forced its hand. That timeline speaks for itself.

Whatever happens on appeal, the jury’s message was blunt. Getting a teenager’s name wrong in a story about a killing carries real consequences, even for the nation’s most powerful newspaper. Accountability, it turns out, still applies to the institutions that spend their days demanding it from everyone else.

BREAKING: 🇺🇸 New York Times has been ordered to pay almost $10 million to an ex-Alabama basketball player they falsely accused of a murder.

The Times had NEVER lost a defamation lawsuit over any of its own articles in over 50 years, until now. pic.twitter.com/8066LDHguq

— Coinvo (@Coinvo) August 21, 2026