Kari Lake and the Trump movement's billion-dollar defamation problem
"For the second time in eight months, a top Donald Trump ally has, extraordinarily, declined to try to prove that they didn’t defame an election worker. Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake (R) has joined former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani in that distinction. The news comes even as Trump owes more than $86 million after losing a pair of defamation cases against E. Jean Carroll, whom he has arguably continued to defame.
Throw in the $787.5 million Fox News agreed to pay a voting machine company over bogus theories that it aired bolstering Trump’s stolen-election claims and the $148 million judgment against Giuliani, and the combined bill is north of $1 billion — and potentially growing, thanks to Lake’s capitulation and other lawsuits.
The Trump political movement has long had a truth problem. That has now manifested itself as a very expensive defamation problem.
As well as anything, these defamation cases lay bare just how careless and demagogic the MAGA movement has become.
The latest big news is Lake’s declining to defend her statements about Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer (R), whom she repeatedly accused of deliberately sabotaging her narrow 2022 loss for Arizona governor. (Courts have repeatedly rejected that argument and upheld Lake’s defeat.)...The situation is strikingly reminiscent of Giuliani’s defamation case eight months ago. Facing an arduous and expensive discovery process — during which Giuliani’s legal team had to produce evidence — Giuliani ultimately simply granted that his statements about Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss were false and even defamatory, before the huge judgment against him."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/27/trump-lake-defamation/