Having spent a year and a half insisting that she actually won the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election, Republican Kari Lake is finally starting to see that her scorched earth policy of attacking everyone who refused to help her overturn the results of that election do indeed come with a price.
What price? Well, perhaps millions in compensatory and punitive damages as the result of a massive defamation lawsuit filed against her by Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer.
Mark Z. Barabak of the Los Angeles Times notes that Lake may finally be held responsible for her irresponsible words and actions.
Last week, a top election official in Arizona, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, filed a defamation lawsuit against his fellow Republican, saying Lake’s blatant lies have cost him friends and lifelong relationships. Her malicious incitement has also resulted in death threats, he said, and harassment aimed at him and his wife.
“Rather than accept political defeat, rather than get a new job, [Lake] has sought to undermine confidence in our elections and has mobilized millions of her followers against me,” Richer wrote in the Arizona Republic. “Her defamatory allegations have unleashed violent vitriol and other dire consequences.”
Richer has a hell of a case, too, Barabak explains.
Her farrago of falsehoods includes allegations that Richer manipulated the printing of election ballots and “inserted” 300,000 phony votes into the final count to prevent Republican candidates, including Lake, from winning.
Lake’s phony claims were repeated numerous times, the lawsuit documents, at political rallies, during podcasts and on social media. Richer seeks unspecified monetary damages as well as a court order determining Lake’s statements were false and requiring her to delete them.
Defamation lawsuits aren’t easy to win. The bar for victory is high, but it’s not impossible as we witnessed recently when a jury awarded writer E. Jean Carroll $5 million in damages against former president Donald Trump for sexually assaulting her and then lying about the matter.
Additionally, Fox “News” also forked over $785.7 million to settle a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems for the lies some of the network’s hosts told about the 2020 presidential election being stolen with the use of voting machines, even going so far as to suggest that the machines had been hacked and manipulated by China and Venezuela.
Kari Lake deserves to be hit with a massive dose of karma, and one that takes an enormous bite out of the money she’s grifted from supporters since she lost in 2022 would be a nice start at righting the many wrongs she’s committed for her own self-aggrandizement.
