Arizona Republican Kari Lake Booted from Gubernatorial Town Hall Audience: She 'Brought the Drama'
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Ross D Franklin/AP/Shutterstock; Brandon Bell/Getty Katie Hobbs, Kari Lake
The organizers of a town hall event featuring two candidates running for Arizona governor say the Republican candidate, Kari Lake, was asked to leave the audience after it appeared she tried to disrupt the event for her opponent, Katie Hobbs.
NBC News reports that both Lake and Hobbs had agreed that neither would be onstage while the other was speaking, with Hobbs slated to speak first.
But the event was briefly upended when Lake — a Republican who has molded her self in the image of former President Donald Trump — sat in the front row before Hobbs took the stage, directly in the line of site of the Democrat.
Per NBC News, Lake was told to return to a waiting area and initially refused, calling on her opponent to come debate her. Eventually, Lake complied with the organizers of the event and left the audience ahead of her own time on stage.
A campaign surrogate for Lake — Mexican telenovela star Eduardo Verástegui — reportedly stayed behind in her place.
"Kari Lake brought along a Mexican telenovela star and she brought the drama. It was like a telenovela," Joe Garcia, who works for one of the groups co-sponsoring the event, told NBC News.
Garcia added that whatever Lake's intentions, the drama appeared to rattle Hobbs, who appeared onstage once Lake left the area.
"[Lake] rattled her opponent," Garcia told NBC News. "She was big, brash, and very larger than life, Trump-esque. Anyone who thinks she was there to follow all the rules doesn't know Kari Lake."
NBC News reports that the event was pre-recorded and will air Saturday night, which means the controversy will likely be edited out (according to the outlet, audience members were not allowed to record the town hall with their phones).
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Hobbs, who is Arizona's Secretary of State, drew much Republican scorn for defending the state's 2020 elections from evidence-free allegations of widespread fraud (a role she has said led her to be on the receiving end of death threats).
Meanwhile, Lake — the Trump-endorsed Republican candidate and a former news anchor — has courted controversy for anti-drag comments (made despite past photos showing the Republican at a drag show) and for a video in which she lambasted the way, she said, that journalism had changed in recent years.
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"I began to fear that I was contributing to the fear and division in this country by continuing on in this profession,'' Lake continued in the video, echoing — if inadvertently — the same criticism of the press fueled by the former president. "It's been a serious struggle for me, and I no longer want to do this job anymore.''
