Arizona Senate hopeful Kari Lake must be more than a little concerned about the recent ruling that awarded Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman $148 million in their defamation case, because Lake basically did the same thing Rudy Giuliani did: defamed an election worker with lies and upended his life, resulting in threats to him and his family. The official is Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican who’s one of the main people in charge of elections.
Lake and her lawyers, who are themselves facing additional penalties for clogging the courts with frivolous lawsuits for Lake, have been trying to get Stephen Richer’s defamation lawsuit tossed. In addition to making a free speech defense, arguing that Lake has a First Amendment right to express her opinions, yesterday they said in court that Lake’s statements were “rhetorical hyperbole” that shouldn’t be taken as fact. That’s rich, because a whole lotta MAGA shitheads did take her statements as fact, and acted on them—violently.
Richer says the case goes well beyond the First Amendment: “Slinging mud is fair game, but Arizona law and the First Amendment draw a line at defamation,” and today Judge Jay Adelman agreed with him and ruled Richer’s lawsuit can go forward.
A Maricopa County judge ruled Wednesday that a defamation case against former gubernatorial and current U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake will go forward.
Richer filed his defamation lawsuit back in March. In it he alleges that Lake, who lost the 2022 Governor’s race to Democrat Katie Hobbs by about 17,000 votes, has ruined his life by telling lies about him, blaming him for her defeat. The lies were central to Lake’s relentless grift, online and at rallies—lotta lawyers to pay, there’s always an appeal. Richer says Kari Lake knew the lies at the core of her grift were lies, hence “malice.”
Among other things, Lake claimed that Richer added 300,000 ballots to the total vote count. At one rally she said, “We know that 300,000 illegal ballots” were added to the tally. How does she “know” this? And why doesn’t anyone else, like election officials or the courts that’ve looked into Lake’s claims? Not only didn’t he add ballots, Richer responded, he couldn’t even if he wanted to. (We hear this every election, that thousands of Mexicans crossed the border to vote illegally for Democrats. We’re good at it, never been caught once.)
Lake also said Richer was a prime mover behind the printer problems in Maricopa County, which caused procedural hiccups in several precincts. The printer error did occur, and although no one was denied their right to cast a vote, the machine glitch was the basis for most of Lake’s lawsuits, all of which she lost. In her telling it wasn’t simply a technical error; no, it was intentional and Stephen Richer was the cause.
Lake told her followers during a Jan. 29 “Save Arizona Rally” that Richer and Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates intentionally printed incorrectly sized ballot images on Election Day 2022 as a form of “sabotage” because they knew that the majority of in-person voters that day would be Republicans supporting Lake, and that the incorrectly-sized ballots would cause the tabulators to reject those ballots.
Sounds to me like “facts” (who, what, when, where, why), not “rhetorical hyperbole” to be ignored. Lake’s base certainly considered her accusations factual—and took action. Just like Republican Rep. Rusty Bowers, who faced harassment and death threats at his home for refusing to get on board the Trump fake elector train in Arizona (while his daughter lay dying at home), Stephen Richer was subject to the same violence from MAGA nutters:
The complaint alleges that as a result of Lake's statements Richer and his family "have been the target of threats of violence, and even death, and have had their lives turned upside down."
As a result of the threats, Richer said he’s always looking over his shoulder, and he’s had to spend thousands of dollars for extra security around his home and at his wife’s workplace. These MAGA nitwits are slime; they have no policy argument—only threats, fear, intimidation, violence. Mr. Richer, on behalf of the communists and fascists Trump imagines in the Democratic Party (it’s a neat trick), I apologize.
Trump says the many lawsuits against him are part of Biden’s effort to silence him while he’s running for office. Likewise, Lake maintains Richer’s lawsuit is simply her opponents’ attempt to clamp down on her speech as she campaigns for the Republican Senate primary. She may have learned one thing: She told the crowd at the Turning Points USA hatefest in Phoenix last week that Richer’s defamation case should be dismissed, but none of the coverage mentions that she doubled down on her lies about Richer by repeating them before the cameras, like Giuliani did—$148 million will get your attention.