Kari Lake declares she's giving up fight against defamation lawsuit
Kari Lake appears to be admitting defeat in a defamation lawsuit brought against her by Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer.
The Republican running for a seat in the U.S. Senate formally requested a motion default judgment — asking a jury to decide how much she owes in damages and sparing her from having to turn over information at the discovery phase, according to Vote Beat.
“She has decided she cannot defend herself in this case despite continuously saying she has evidence,” said Ben Berwick, a lawyer at Protect Democracy with is among the firms representing Richer in the lawsuit against the candidate who failed in her 2022 run for Arizona governor.
Richer, who is a Republican, sued Lake for defamation last summer accusing Lake of making unflattering statements that he had played a hand in rigging the gubernatorial election that she lost by 17,000 votes to Democrat Katie Hobbs Hobbs.
He immediately capitalized on Lake's motion Tuesday, painting it as an admission of liability.
"Kari: You lied," he wrote in a tweet "You just accepted liability. You will now have a judgment entered, in court, against you, for lying about our elections and me. It was all B.S."
In a statement to The Washington Post, a senior adviser to Lake countered: “Kari Lake maintains she has always been truthful.”
Hours before the revelation of Lake's court filing surrender, she posted a video of her vowing to dig in for the long haul.
"Elected government officials are punishing me with a frivolous lawsuit and threatening to take everything I own," she said. "What they don't realize is even if they leave me, my husband, and my children homeless and penniless — that won't stop us. We will continue to fight for Arizona."
Without naming 38-year-old Richer by name, Lake accused powerful forces at work using "lawfare," which she defines as "weaponizing the legal system to punish, impoverish, and destroy political opponents."
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Lake expressed how she and former President Donald Trump are connected in this way.
"We've all seen how they're doing this to President Trump and here in Arizona they're doing the same thing to me... keeping us tied up and off the campaign trail," she said.
Among the comments Richer claimed were defamatory was a claim that Richer and his attorneys, “Intentionally printed 19-inch images on 20-inch ballots to sabotage the 2022 Arizona general election,” according to the complaint, cited by Vote Beat.
She also accused Richer of having “inserted 300,000 ‘illegal,’ ‘invalid,’ ‘phony’, and/or ‘bogus’ early-vote ballots into the Maricopa County vote count,” he said.
In earlier legal filings, Lake blamed Richer for having “sabotaged the election to prevent Republican candidates, including Lake, from winning.”