Sarah Palin arrives at court with ex-NHL player and one-time NYC playboy Ron Duguay

Sarah Palin arrived at court with former New York Rangers star and longtime Big Apple gadfly Ron Duguay in tow on Wednesday. 

The former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate, 57, and the ex-Broadway Blueshirts forward, 64, were seen at the Southern District of New York in Manhattan as she continues her defamation trial against The New York Times. 

Palin is reportedly ‘just friends’ with Duguay, a source close to Palin insisted after the pair was pictured dining together in New York City last week.

The source, according to People Magazine, said they became friends after they ‘met through hockey.’ 

The two certainly looked like the best of friends as they walked into court Wednesday holding hands and even stopping to pose for photos. Palin was seen smiling in sunglasses while donning a fuchsia pink blazer and a black pencil skirt.

Duguay, also sporting shades, layered up with dark grey jacket, a grey sweater and a button-down shirt. 

New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet began his testimony on Wednesday, the fifth day of the trial. 

Palin, a self-proclaimed ‘hockey mom,’ was rumored to be dating ex-NHL player Duguay, as sources told Page Six they have been involved since late last year.

The pair was spotted dining outside in late January at Elio’s on the Upper East Side in New York City – two days after Palin knew she had tested positive for COVID ahead of her trial.

That evening, Duguay, 64, was notably protective of Palin, 57, reportedly bristling at reporters and shielding the former Alaska governor from them. The pair was with a group of five or six people.

‘Hi there,’ a photographer said to Palin’s dinner party at the time. ‘Are any of you guys concerned that she tested positive for COVID? I’m just curious.’

Duguay got up from the table and approached the photographer, according to the New York Daily News, and asked: ‘Are you looking for trouble?’ He then reportedly knocked the camera out of the photographer’s hands. 

Palin has been divorced from her high-school sweetheart Todd since 2020. The two were married for 32 years and share five children, including Dancing with the Stars contestant Bristol, 31.

Duguay is a Canadian former professional hockey player who spent 12 seasons with the NHL from 1977 to 1989. He played for several different teams throughout his career but was drafted by the Rangers and played his first six seasons in New York, notorious for his flashy behavior and long hair.

Duguay was married to Sports Illustrated Swimsuit model Kim Alexis in 1993. They divorced in 2016. He had briefly dated Charlie’s Angels starlet Farrah Fawcett in the 1980s – and had claimed that paparazzi photos of the pair in Page Six got him traded from the Rangers. 

‘Herb Brooks, the coach, he had this talk with me about ‘staying out of Page Six, being in the sports page,’ and sure enough I was in Page Six once again,’ Duguay has said. ‘It had something to do with me being seen with Farrah… Two months after that, I got traded.’

Famously, Duguay and his Ranger teammates Phil Esposito, Ron Greschner, Anders Hedberg and Don Maloney danced and skated in an ad for Sasson Jeans in the 1980s. 

He was also a regular on the nightclub scene with some of the most celebrated partiers of the era.

Back in 2019, Duguay spoke to the Post about ending up in KISS lead singer Gene Simmons’ bed with Cher after a night at Studio 54 with the likes of Liza Minelli. 

The legendary singer and actress took Duguay back to a house, where he ‘looked around at the gold records on the wall of the house, but he noticed they weren’t Cher’s records, but rather those of KISS. Cher then told Duguay they were at Simmons’ house.’

‘So I’m in Gene Simmons’ townhouse, not sure why I’m there. Next thing I know, she told me, ”We’re not doing anything tonight,”’ Duguay added. ‘Next thing you know, we’re sitting on his bed. And that’s where the story stops.’ 

Bennett testifies a day after a New York Times editorial board editor who reviewed the article at the center of a libel suit brought by Sarah Palin claimed the paper did not include the former governor’s name or an apology in its correction in a bid to not ‘repeat the error’, a court heard Tuesday. 

Linda Cohn took the stand for a second day at the Manhattan courthouse where she was quizzed over her editing of the paper’s June 2017 article about gun control that linked Palin’s campaign rhetoric to a 2011 mass shooting in Arizona. 

Palin’s attorneys previously argued that ‘we are not here trying to win your votes for Governor Palin or any of her policies,’ but instead wanted the New York Times found liable for a ‘particularly horrific and debunked’ editorial.

Palin showed up more than a week after the scheduled start of a trial in her libel lawsuit against the Times was postponed because she tested positive for COVID-19.

 She’s seeking unspecified damages based on claims that an editorial in the Times hurt her budding career as a political commentator. 

Bennet testified during the trial’s fifth day that changes he made to a draft of the editorial, which the Times later corrected, were not intended to hold the 2008 Republican U.S. vice presidential candidate or her political action committee responsible for the shooting.

‘Did you intend to cause Ms. Palin any harm through any of your edits to the draft?’ the Times’ lawyer David Axelrod asked Bennet, a former Times editorial page editor, in Manhattan federal court.

‘No, I didn’t,’ Bennet responded.

Bennet also said ‘no’ when asked if he tried to blame Palin or the political action committee.

The trial is a test of longstanding legal protections for U.S. media against defamation claims by public figures.

Palin sued the newspaper over a June 14, 2017, editorial about gun control and that lamented the deterioration of political discourse. It was written after a shooting at a Virginia baseball field where U.S. Representative Steve Scalise, a Louisiana Republican, was wounded.

The editorial referred to the January 2011 shooting in an Arizona parking lot by gunman Jared Lee Loughner where six people died and Giffords, a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives at the time, was among those wounded.

It referred to Palin’s political action committee having earlier circulated a map that put Giffords and 19 other Democrats under cross hairs.

Bennet added incorrect language to a colleague’s draft that said ‘the link to political incitement was clear’ between the map and the Giffords shooting.

In Wednesday’s testimony, Bennet maintained that he added the language while under deadline pressure without researching the issue, thinking that an ‘atmosphere of such highly charged political rhetoric’ could prompt such incidents.

Bennet also denied adding the language in order to suggest Loughner used the cross hairs map.

‘If I thought it caused the violence, I would have used the word ’cause,” Bennet said. ‘I should have slowed down.’

The Times’ correction of the editorial did not mention Palin. Her lawyers have pointed to that omission several times, and tried to show the correction was too slow.

Bennet testified on Tuesday that the Times does not apologize for corrections but he thought its correction served as an apology to Palin, even if she did not take it that way.

‘I have regretted this pretty much every day since,’ Bennet said on Wednesday.

To win, Palin must prove that Bennet and the Times acted with ‘actual malice,’ meaning they knew the editorial was false or had reckless disregard for the truth.

She has signaled that if she lost at trial, her appeal would challenge a landmark 1964 U.S. Supreme Court decision, New York Times v Sullivan, that established the actual malice standard.

Bennet is the fifth current or former Times employee called by Palin’s lawyers to testify. The trial is unusual because plaintiffs’ lawyers normally call witnesses supporting their client. Palin is expected to testify at the trial, potentially as soon as Thursday afternoon.

Judge Ned Rakoff said closing arguments will take place on Friday in the case. 

Palin sued the Times in 2017, accusing it of damaging her reputation with an editorial about gun control published after Louisiana U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise, also a Republican, was wounded when a man who was a Bernie Sanders supporter and anti-GOP opened fire on a congressional baseball team practice in Washington.

In the editorial, the Times wrote that before the 2011 mass shooting in an Arizona supermarket parking lot that severely wounded former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords and killed six others, Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of electoral districts that put Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized crosshairs.

Palin’s attorney Shane Vogt argued in his opening statement that Times Opinion editor Bennet acted with malice and was a symptom of a longtime liberal bias in the paper, which counsel said wanted to hurt Palin. 

Vogt told jurors his client was fighting an ‘uphill battle’ as she tries to show the editorial reflected the Times’ disregard of the facts and ‘history of bias’ toward her and other Republicans. 

He began by noting Sarah Palin’s actions when people blamed Sanders one of his supporters shot up the baseball practice.  

‘She didn’t do that. In fact, she did quite the opposite,’ Vogt said. ‘She defended Sanders because she’d been wrongly blamed after the 2011 [Gabrielle Giffords] shootings.

Vogt said that unlike Palin, Bennet ‘had his narrative and he stuck to it,’ blaming the former governor.

Attorneys for the Times said the paper had no desire to hurt Palin and that evidence would show they didn’t act with malice, which is what the law requires in a defamation claim.

‘The Times corrected that editorial the very next morning, and you will see they apologized for that mistake,’ said attorney David Axelrod, who called the error ‘regrettable’ but that it didn’t harm Palin because she continued to make speeches and appear as a pundit, on The Masked Singer, and that she has spoken of running for offices as high as US Senate. 

‘The Times made a mistake and they corrected that mistake,’ Axelrod said. ‘The editorial was not even about her.’

Axelrod also argued that the Times opinion section is a separate part of the paper from the news department and therefore should be held to a different standard. 

During cross-examination Tuesday, attorneys for the paper asked Cohn about the eventual correction to the piece, which had omitted Palin’s name. 

Cohn said the correction did not include her name nor an apology because the NYT has a policy of not ‘repeating the error’, and agreed when asked if it’d be more ‘gracious’ to not mention Palin.

When asked by defense attorneys if she intentionally published a false statement in the article, Cohn replied: ‘No, I would never do that.’ 

The Times had quickly issued a correction after publication stating the article had ‘incorrectly stated that a link existed between political rhetoric and the 2011 shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords.’

‘In fact, no such link was established. The editorial also incorrectly described a map distributed by a political action committee before that shooting,’ it continued. 

Palin’s attorney Ken Turkel, however, noted during his questioning that the Times had still kept Palin’s name in the article in the correction.  

Exhibits presented in court Tuesday also showed Cohn had concerns that one of the paragraphs in the pre-publication draft implied ‘equivalence’ between both political parties and asked whether there was an instance of violent rhetoric on the left that the editorial could point to.