She’s mixing business with pleasure!
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is making the most of her time in New York — and even took in a hockey game with her ex-New York Rangers star beau Ron Duguay — while in town for her defamation retrial against the New York Times.
The lovebirds caught the Rangers’ 9-2 trouncing of the New York Islanders last week at UBS Arena in Elmont, Palin told The Post at Manhattan federal court, where she’s suing the newspaper over an 2017 editorial.
“I love it. It’s a great distraction,” she said while recounting her time at the game.
Duguay supported Palin in court at her first trial in 2022, but did not attend Tuesday’s opening statements at the second go-around as he’s recovering from a health issue, the onetime GOP vice presidential nominee said.
When asked outside court how things were going with Duguay, Palin — sporting a cherry-red boucle overcoat — cheerily responded, “Oh, he’s battling a health issue right now, but otherwise very well.”
“I just texted him to tell him how the day went,” she added.
Palin, 61, also noted that Duguay bought her the snappy houndstooth Oxford heels she wore to court to the start of a trial expected to last two weeks.
“Hopefully he’ll be here, we’ll see,” she told The Post in the courthouse lobby.
Earlier in the day, Palin’s lawyer claimed in opening statements that the Times engaged in a “sickeningly familiar pattern” by allegedly defaming her in an editorial that linked her campaign rhetoric to a 2011 assassination attempt on Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
The Times admitted the error, and one of its lawyers, Felicia Ellsworth, told jurors Tuesday that the Grey Lady “corrected the record as loudly, clearly and quickly as possible.”
But Palin’s lawyer Shane Vogt claimed that the Times’ correction did not go far enough because it did not mention the mom-of-five by name.
“They just couldn’t bring themselves to say, ‘Governor Palin, we’re sorry, we made this mistake about you,'” said Vogt, who represented Hulk Hogan in a 2016 trial — bankrolled by conservative billionaire Peter Thiel — that bankrupted the website Gawker.
“It’s not just what was said, it was who said it,” Vogt added. “It’s the New York Times — it is the paper of record. Its voice is loud and far-reaching.”
A federal appeals court ordered Palin to get a new trial last August, finding that the judge overseeing the case had wrongly excluded evidence favorable to her.
Jurors at the first trial in 2022 found that the newspaper did not defame Palin, but only after several of them had seen a news alert on their phone that the judge had decided to toss the case while they were still deliberating.
The jury this time around has agreed to surrender all smartphones and other internet-connected devices to courthouse security in order to avoid reading about the case while at the courthouse, Manhattan federal Judge Jed Rakoff said Tuesday.
