An Arizona Superior Court judge has smacked down failed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake's attempt to get a defamation lawsuit filed against her dismissed.
In a new ruling, Judge Jay Adleman concluded that Republican Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer had properly established cause to believe that Lake defamed him when she accused him of deliberately ordering the misprinting of ballots in 2022 and when she accused him of deliberately inserting 300,000 illegal ballots into the Maricopa County vote totals to steal the election from her.
The key, Adelman says, is that the allegedly defamatory statements meet the law's requirements to be "provably false," meaning that the claims made by Lake were specific enough that they can be shown to be untrue.
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"Defendant Lake’s statements purport to announce objective facts pertaining to the size of the ballots and the intentional conduct of Plaintiff Richer," the judge wrote. "Depending upon the nature of any available evidence at a trial, a jury could determine whether those statements were either true or false."
The other key element of the case, wrote Adelman, is that Richer has established that there are grounds to believe Lake's false statements were made with malice.
Among other things, notes Adelman, is the fact that Lake continued making false claims about Richer "even after in the aftermath of their unsuccessful election contest" in which courts asserted her claims to be without merit.
