The New York Times just lost its first U.S. defamation case over one of its own articles in more than 50 years, and the guy who beat them was a Alabama walk-on who was never even at the shooting.
Kai Spears got $9.25 million from an eight-person Alabama jury on Thursday after the paper put him in a car he was not riding in on the night a 23-year-old mother was killed near campus. I have covered enough college basketball messes to know how these stories usually die. The kid gets named. The denial gets a clause. The internet keeps the first version. Spears refused that script.
He was a freshman walk-on in January 2023 when Jamea Harris was shot and killed in Tuscaloosa. Three Alabama basketball players were present. The passenger in Brandon Miller’s car, the one hit by bullets, was team student manager Cooper Lee. Spears had been with Miller earlier that night, then was blocks away and out of the picture. The Times published otherwise on March 15, 2023, citing a person familiar with the investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity. The piece framed a fourth player in the car and a near-deadlier scene. Alabama’s athletic director denied it. Spears’ father denied it. The paper kept the identification.
They Wanted a Retraction. The Times Wanted a Fight.
Christian Spears said the quiet part out loud after the verdict. “Our goal was a simple retraction from The New York Times. Instead, the Times defended its inaccurate article and continued to distort facts rather than acknowledge the harm they caused, acting as if its power made it untouchable.” That is the entire case in two sentences. Not a technical foul. A choice.
The lawsuit landed May 30, 2023. The editor’s note and correction arrived June 2. Three days. They had the denials in March. They had the affidavit material once the suit dropped. Only then did they swap Spears for Cooper Lee and express regret. Billy Witz, the reporter, apologized on the stand during the nine-day trial and called it a mistake built on a high-level anonymous source and a secondary description of a “White guy on the basketball team.” I believe he meant the apology. I also believe the timeline is the evidence. You do not get to treat a walk-on’s name like a draft pick you can stash until discovery forces a roster move.
Spears’ attorney Matt Glover told the room the verdict “will improve journalism throughout the country.” I am less romantic than Glover. I am more practical. Anonymous sourcing on a murder-adjacent college story is rocket fuel. Once the first version hits, the kid is linked forever in search results and recruiting whispers and family group chats. Spears claimed emotional distress and permanent association with a murder. The jury bought both the defamation and false light claims after about five hours. Roughly $7.5 million of the award was punitive. That is not a gentle reminder. That is a jury telling a national paper the power imbalance offended them.
The Honest-Mistake Defense Collapsed in Tuscaloosa
Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander called it “an honest mistake” and said the verdict and damages “are contrary to law and not supported by the evidence.” They are reviewing options, which means the Eleventh Circuit is probably next, and Alabama’s caps may shave more than $2 million off the total anyway. Fine. Appeal. Recalculate. None of that restores the months Spears spent as the unnamed fourth body in every bar conversation about that night.
I keep coming back to who this kid was when the article ran. Eighteen. Walk-on. Earned a scholarship for 2023-24 and appeared in 11 games, then transferred to Marshall and later West Liberty. He was never the star. He was never the story until the Times made him one. After the verdict he thanked God, his lawyers Stephen New, Matt Glover, and Ginger Buck, and the jury. “My hope is that we all lead with love and always seek the one constant truth in this life.” That is a soft landing from a hard fight. His father was sharper. “Their verdict is a reminder that no institution, regardless of power or reach, is above accountability.”
College athletes already live inside a content machine that treats their worst night as inventory. When the inventory is wrong, the correction has to move at the speed of the original sin, not the speed of the legal department. The Times had the denials, sat on the identification, and only fixed the record once a federal complaint made the cost of stubbornness higher than the cost of the editor’s note. A Tuscaloosa jury just priced that stubbornness at $9.25 million and ended a half-century clean sheet in the process.
Spears asked for his name back. He got a judgment instead. The paper can keep calling it honest. The search bar still has to catch up to the truth the jury already wrote down.
