FILE – Kari Lake speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC 2023, March 4, 2023, at National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Md. (AP Photo/Alex Brando, File)
Failed Republican U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake has reached a settlement agreement with a local Arizona election official she falsely claimed rigged the 2022 election and caused her loss in the state’s gubernatorial election. The agreement brings an end to the defamation lawsuit brought against Lake by Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer last year.
Two people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post that the particulars of the settlement agreement are confidential, but Richer provided a statement to the newspaper saying that “both sides are satisfied with the result.”
“We are pleased,” Lake’s lawyer, Dennis Wilenchik, said in a statement to NBC News. Wilenchik reportedly also emphasized that it was common practice for the terms of the settlement to remain private.
Richer, a registered Republican, in June 2023 filed a complaint against Lake, her campaign, and the fundraising entity that she controlled, describing them as knowingly deceitful and financially motivated.
“Courts at every level of the Arizona judiciary have concluded that Defendants have no evidence to support their wild claims. But Defendants continued to spread these egregious and harmful falsities to further their own agendas — and line their own pockets — at Richer’s expense,” Richer’s complaint stated.
That campaign by Lake and her entities resulted in “threats of violence, and even death” against Richer and his family, who have had their “lives turned upside down,” according to the lawsuit.
Lake, a staunch election denier, claimed that Richer “sabotaged” vote tabulators in the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election she lost. She claimed Richer purposefully printed the “wrong image on the ballot” (one inch smaller) and claimed that “300,000 illegal ballots” with “zero chain of custody” marred the election.
Lake lost the gubernatorial election by a 17,117-vote margin to her Democratic rival, Gov. Katie Hobbs
As Law&Crime previously reported, the Arizona Supreme Court in March refused to keep the lawsuit on hold, meaning the defamation case would move toward discovery and trial. The high court rejection came months after a lower court judge ruled Richer made “actionable defamation claim(s)” regarding “provably false” statements that a trial jury could determine to be “either true or false.”
The trial judge ruled that Lake’s words were no mere “imaginative expression or rhetorical hyperbole,” since ballot image size and the number of allegedly illegal ballots were matters that could be proven true or false.
After her efforts to stop the defamation suit failed, Lake decided not to contest her liability in the case, asserting that she did not want to legitimize Richer’s claims.
Lake’s attorneys claimed that “defaulting” did not amount to an admission.
“It is often said that defaulting admits the allegations in the operative complaint. This is a misnomer,” the defense wrote, before citing case law that says: “An entry of default serves as a judicial admission of all well-pleaded facts in the complaint. A party against whom default is entered, however, is not held to admit facts that are not well-pleaded or to admit conclusions of law.”
Notably, when the trial judge ruled against Lake by refusing to throw out the lawsuit, he wrote that Richer “offers well pled factual allegations to support his assertion that any statements regarding ballot manipulation are false and defamatory.”
Earlier this month, Lake lost her Senate race to Democratic candidate Ruben Gallego. Richer in July lost a primary election for the county recorder position to state Rep. Justin Heap.
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