The campaign of New Jersey GOP gubernatorial candidate Jack Ciattarelli announced Thursday that he will file a defamation lawsuit against Democratic rival Rep. Mickey Sherrill (NJ) following comments she made during a debate Wednesday about him, his business and the opioid crisis.
“Last night, faced continued questions about his refusal to release disciplinary records that would reveal his true role at the Naval Academy fraud scandalAnd when pressed about his unusually brief tenure as a federal prosecutor, Mickey Sherrill rebuked him,” Ciattarelli campaign strategist Chris Russell said in a statement.
“In doing so, he claimed – twice – that Jack Ciattarelli ‘killed thousands of people, including children,’ a clearly outrageous attack that shocked arbitrators, the press and the public alike,” he continued.
He said, “At a time when political violence and violent rhetoric are becoming increasingly prevalent, Mickey Sherrill has baselessly and recklessly accused a political opponent of mass murder in a televised debate.”
The lawsuit is expected to be filed early next week.
Sherrill and Ciattarellimet on wednesday nightfor their second and last debate in New Brunswick, NJ, which was often acrimonious and heated.
At one point, one of the moderators asked both candidates how they would bring jobs to New Jersey given the state’s 5 percent unemployment rate and the many factors that increase hiring uncertainty.
“My opponent loves to talk a lot about being a businessman, but I think New Jersey doesn’t know that much about his business, how he made millions by working with some of the worst criminals and saying opioids were safe, publishing his propaganda, while thousands of New Jerseyans died,” Sherrill said after Ciattarelli gave his answer.
“And as if that wasn’t enough, he was paid to develop an app so that people who were addicted could get easy access to opioids,” she added. “And so, as he made millions, as these opioid companies made billions, thousands of New Jerseyans died.”
This sparked an argument between the two and both said, “You should be ashamed.”
Ciattarelli responded that when former President Biden was in office, “he had no problem with thousands of people coming to our border every day” and said that Sherrill was lying about her professional career.
“I’m proud of my career,” he said.
NJ.comReported in September 2021,Before New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy (D) and Ciattarelli faced off in the November gubernatorial election that year, his business, Galen Publishing, produced continuing education materials for the University of Tennessee’s School of Pharmacy, which was largely financed by pharmaceutical companies.
The New Jersey news outlet noted that some of the materials appeared to downplay the risks associated with opioid abuse, although a spokesperson for Ciattarelli’s campaign told the news outlet at the time that the drug makers were not proposing topics for educational materials, but rather school faculty.
Ciattarelli sold the business between 2008 and 2017, according to NJ.com.
Sherrill insisted after those comments that during the debate she would be “happy to publish the information” and added that “I think the people you got addicted to and died from deserved better than you.”
“I think you’re trying to distract from the fact that you killed thousands of people by printing your misinformation, your propaganda, and then getting paid to develop an app so people can more easily get opioids after they become addicted,” Sherrill said accusingly at one point.
Ciattarelli responded to Sherrill, pointing out, “The difference between me and the Congresswoman: I got to walk her at my college graduation.” recent revelations That she did not walk during her commencement ceremony at the US Naval Academy in 1994. Attacking Sherrill over stock trades, he said he “never broke the law”.
Sherrill has said that she did not walk because she did not join some of her classmates during the widespread cheating scandal there, but Ciattarelli has suggested that Sherrill is not being completely truthful.
Sherrill’s campaign doubled down on its allegations in response to Ciattarelli’s announcement that he would file a lawsuit, with spokesman Sean Higgins saying in a statement that the Republican is “clearly unfit to lead this state and defend it.”
“Jack’s reaction has been to hide behind a lawsuit, not to take responsibility,” Higgins said. “Reckless and irresponsible is the way Jack Ciattarelli is making millions of dollars off the pain of New Jerseyans — publishing misinformation about the dangers of opioid addiction and developing an app to train patients to ask doctors for more drugs.”
The extensive back-and-forth between the campaigns has underlined the contentious nature of the governor’s race, which has at times become personal and heated. Whereas recent poll Emerson College Polling/PIX11 News/The Hill shows Sherrill with massive lead over Ciattarelli Survey conducted last month There was a lot of warmth between the two.
