An Alabama jury ordered the New York Times to pay $9.25 million to a former college basketball player the paper falsely placed at the scene of a fatal shooting, a verdict that marks the Times's first defamation loss in more than half a century.
Kai Spears was an 18-year-old freshman walk-on for the University of Alabama's Crimson Tide when the Times published a March 15, 2023, article by sportswriter Billy Witz identifying Spears as a passenger in a car at the scene of a January 2023 shooting in Tuscaloosa that killed 23-year-old Jamea Harris. The problem: Spears was not there. The person actually in the car was Cooper Lee, a student manager for the team. Witz relied on a single anonymous source, someone he described in testimony as a "high-level person, professional", to pin the identification on Spears.
After a nine-day trial in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama, an eight-person jury found the Times liable for defamation and awarded Spears $9.25 million in damages, Fox News Digital reported. The Times itself acknowledged it had not lost a defamation lawsuit brought in the United States over one of its articles in more than 50 years.
The timeline tells the story of how the Times handled its error, and how long it took the paper to fully correct the record.
Witz's article went live on March 15, 2023. Almost immediately, Alabama's athletic director and Spears's father denied that Spears had been present at the shooting. The Times included those denials in its reporting but, by its own account, "did not conclude that any other change to the article was warranted at that time." The paper stood by the story.
It was only after Spears filed his defamation lawsuit, which included what the Times described as "new details about the incident", that editors assigned further reporting. That additional work determined the person at the scene was Cooper Lee, not Spears. The Times issued a lengthy editor's note in June 2023, roughly three months after the original article.
The editor's note stated plainly that the article "erroneously identified that person as Kai Spears, a freshman basketball player." It added: "The Times regrets the error in the initial report."
But regret and a correction did not end the matter. The lawsuit proceeded to trial.
During the trial, Witz, a veteran reporter who had been with the Times since 2008, acknowledged the article contained a factual error. According to testimony reported by the New York Post, Witz told the court:
"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."
A second anonymous source offered even thinner support. That person told Witz, according to his testimony: "I can tell you it's a White guy on the basketball team, I just don't remember his name." Witz treated the first source as reliable enough to publish the identification of an 18-year-old student by name in connection with a fatal shooting, without independent verification.
Witz also testified that "the story had a focus, and this tragedy, as bad as it was, could have been much worse." He conceded directly: "Yes, [the story] had a mistake, no question."
Matt Glover, the attorney representing Spears, framed the jury's decision as something larger than one case. AP News reported Glover's reaction to the verdict:
"This verdict will improve journalism throughout the country."
Spears argued the false report caused lasting emotional distress and permanently linked his name to a murder he had nothing to do with. He was a walk-on, not a scholarship star, not a public figure courting media attention. He was a teenager whose name was attached to a killing on the basis of a single anonymous tip that turned out to be wrong.
The shooting itself involved Crimson Tide star player Brandon Miller, who was in the car at the scene. Breitbart reported that three other Alabama basketball players were actually present at the January 2023 shooting, which killed Harris, described as a 23-year-old mother. Spears was not among them.
A Times spokesperson, Charlie Stadtlander, responded to the verdict with a statement to Fox News Digital:
"We're disappointed the jury found The Times liable for an honest mistake. 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."
The characterization of the error as "honest" is worth examining against the record. The Times published the identification based on one anonymous source. When the subject's own father and the university's athletic director immediately denied it, the paper reviewed its reporting and decided no correction was needed. Only after Spears sued, and provided additional evidence, did the Times go back and discover the actual person at the scene was someone else entirely.
That sequence does not describe a newsroom that caught its own mistake. It describes a newsroom that was forced to confront one.
Whether the Times will appeal remains an open question. The paper said it is "reviewing" its options but did not specify whether it would seek to overturn the verdict or negotiate a settlement. Spears's legal team did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.
The verdict's significance extends beyond the dollar figure. For more than half a century, the Times had not lost a defamation case brought in the United States over one of its articles. That streak ended in a federal courtroom in Alabama, brought down not by a politician or a corporation but by a college freshman who was never at the scene the Times placed him in.
Defamation cases against major news organizations are notoriously difficult to win. The legal standard, established by the Supreme Court in the 1964 case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, generally requires plaintiffs to prove that a publication acted with "actual malice," meaning it published false information knowingly or with reckless disregard for the truth. The fact that an Alabama jury found the Times liable suggests the panel concluded the paper's reliance on a single anonymous source, combined with its refusal to correct the record when confronted with denials, crossed that line.
The breakdown of the $9.25 million award, how much was compensatory and how much, if any, was punitive, has not been publicly detailed. Nor has the identity of Witz's anonymous source been disclosed.
What is clear is the cost of the Times's sourcing failure. An 18-year-old student's name was published in connection with a fatal shooting. The paper brushed off immediate denials from people in a position to know. It took a lawsuit to produce a correction. And it took a jury to produce accountability.
The New York Times has spent decades positioning itself as the gold standard of American journalism. An eight-person jury in Alabama just put a $9.25 million price tag on what happens when the standard slips, and the institution refuses to own it until someone forces its hand.
