Court: Vaseline Woman Must Face Defamation Lawsuit

Arizona Central reports:

A Maricopa County judge ruled Wednesday that a defamation case against former gubernatorial and current U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake will go forward. Judge Jay Adleman determined that Lake failed to provide enough evidence to get the case dismissed outright under a recently revised state law intending to deter lawsuits that seek to censor or intimidate critics.

The lawsuit, filed in June by Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, accuses Lake and her affiliates of spreading false information about Richer following the November 2022 election. He alleges that Lake knew the statements were false. Lake and Richer are both Republicans. She condemned his defamation suit against her while appearing at Turning Point USA’s annual conference in Phoenix on Sunday.

The Meidas Touch reports:

The Court noted that the instances of Lake’s statements about Richer alleging fraud were too numerous to mention in the Order, but he cited two particularly egregious examples of statements Lake made at her January 9, 2023 ‘Save Arizona Rally,’ where she said:

“Richer and Gates intentionally printed the wrong image on the ballot on Election Day so those ballots would intentionally be spit out of the tabulators … Well, these guys are really, really terrible at running elections but I found out they’re really good at lying.”

Her second statement at the same event claimed that she had “whistleblowers” who claimed that 300,000 illegal ballots were counted in her race. Lake’s attorneys argued that her statements were not intentional lies made with malice, just “examples of imaginative expression or rhetorical hyperbole.”

“The court is satisfied that the disputed statements — if indeed they are ‘provable’ as false or defamatory — would be undeserving of the protections associated with our First Amendment principles,” said Judge Jay Adleman.

Read my latest on Richer v. Lake:https://t.co/XHOjmAopOm

— Sasha Hupka 🌵 (@SashaHupka) December 20, 2023