Rudy Giuliani ordered to pay $148 million for false 2020 election claims
A federal jury ordered Rudy Giuliani on Friday to pay $148 million to two election workers who sued him for defamation, asserting that the former attorney for Donald Trump exposed them to a life-altering torrent of abuse and trauma by promoting false claims that they stole the 2020 election from the former president in Georgia.
The panel of five women and three men in Washington deliberated for more than nine hours before entering a stunning penalty that was more than three times the $48 million sought by the workers, in the first large judgment against an individual in Trump’s orbit for propagating the myth that vote fraud tipped the election to President Biden.
The damages verdict came in a defamation lawsuit filed against Giuliani, 79, by Fulton County, Ga., election workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss, whom Trump and others on the former president’s campaign and legal teams falsely accused of manipulating the absentee ballot count in Atlanta.
“Today is a good day,” Freeman said, standing outside the courthouse with Moss after a jury awarded the mother and daughter pair $75 million in punitive and $73 million in compensatory damages for defamation and emotional distress.
Their attorneys in closing arguments had urged jurors to “send a message” to Giuliani and others in public life that the “facts matter.” On Friday Moss added, “Giuliani was not the only one who spread lies about us, and others must be held accountable, too.”
The jury decision marks a stunning downfall for Giuliani, after his attorney warned jurors that a penalty of tens of millions of dollars could mark “the end” for the former New York mayor and onetime Manhattan U.S. prosecutor, whose law license was earlier suspended over his election falsehoods. And it puts the defiant, debt-threatened Giuliani near the top of a long list of Trump advisers and news media outlets to face legal consequences for amplifying his false allegations. In April, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems almost $780 million to settle a lawsuit claiming that the network damaged the voting machine company’s reputation by peddling false claims that its equipment switched votes from Trump to Biden.
Dominion and another voting machine company, Smartmatic, have separate lawsuits pending against media companies, Giuliani, former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell and others. And Trump faces lawsuits for damages from Democratic lawmakers and Capitol Police officers for the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack.
Giuliani, however, is one of the first Trump aides to face a jury verdict, a potentially worrying sign for him as he faces criminal charges in Georgia accusing him of related efforts to overturn Biden’s victory there. Giuliani is also described as an uncharged “Co-conspirator 1” in Trump’s indictment on federal charges in Washington for obstruction of the 2020 election.
Giuliani was unrepentant after the ruling, telling reporters outside the courthouse, “The absurdity of the number underscores the absurdity of the entire proceeding,” and adding falsely that “I have not been allowed to offer one single piece of evidence in defense, of which I have a lot.”
U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell had found Giuliani liable by default earlier this year, based on his own admissions and his refusal to turn over to the women’s attorneys evidence in the case and relevant information such as his net worth and the size of his radio, YouTube and other online audiences.
That left jurors at his week-long trial only to decide the penalty for one count each of defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress and civil conspiracy based on 16 defamatory statements against the workers. A defense expert testified that the false claims were seen 35 million times online and in media reports beginning in December 2020, and the women took the stand this week describing racist and vicious attacks they suffered after Giuliani’s comments. Giuliani declined to contest the facts of the case and did not testify in his own defense, despite publicly saying that he would.
In closing arguments, attorney Michael Gottlieb urged jurors to remind powerful people that they have “no right to offer defenseless civil servants up to a virtual mob” or to seek profit and fame “by assassinating the character of ordinary people.”
Giuliani repeated his attacks against the two workers outside the courthouse Monday, while defense attorney Joseph D. Sibley IV told jurors in closing arguments three days later that his client did not testify out of respect for the women, who “have been through enough.”
Sibley argued to the jury that Giuliani alone should not face a “catastrophic” penalty when he did not intend or author any of the threatening or racist remarks made to Freeman and Moss, and said the election workers were victims “of a controversy involving a lot of people, not just Rudy Giuliani.”
“Mr. Giuliani is a good man,” Sibley said, even if “he hasn’t exactly helped himself with some of the things that happened in the past few days.”
In contrast to his in-court defense, outside of court after the verdict, Giuliani continued to portray himself as a victim of a legal system “weaponized” by political opponents, similar to arguments Trump has made. Giuliani said he was “quite confident” that the case would be reversed “before a fair tribunal” on appeal, adding, “The election of 2020 has to be exposed because if not, our country will no longer be a democracy.”
Someone in the crowd shouted moments later: “You’re a liar, Rudy. You’ll die in prison.”
According to trial evidence, Giuliani led a reckless, desperate effort to persuade state lawmakers and Congress to overturn the election in part based on misleading security footage of the two women, summarized in a December 2020 strategic communications plan for Trump’s legal team. Giuliani accused the pair — Moss a full-time election worker and Freeman a temporary one — of seeking to stuff vote-counting machines with “suitcases” of fake ballots and a thumb drive of electronic data after shooing away observers.
None of the accusations against the mother and daughter were true, a Georgia secretary of state investigation found. The supposed suitcases at State Farm Arena, where the women were working, were regular ballot boxes, and the purported USB drive was a ginger mint.
On Dec. 7, 2020, Giuliani highlighted the Georgia video in a text responding to a Trump adviser’s request for the “best examples of ‘election fraud’ that we’ve alleged that’s super easy to explain.”
“Doesn’t necessarily have to be proven,” the text went on, “but does need to be easy to understand.”
Giuliani went on to boast that his claims had gone “viral.” And Trump referred to the video in meetings with top Justice Department officials and in a phone call with Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, during which the president asked Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes.”
Trump boasted to Raffensperger that Freeman’s “reputation is done — she’s known all over the internet” for fraud and the meme “Where’s Ruby?”
On the witness stand, Moss, 39, testified how she quit a job as a $39,000-a-year election worker, which she had first likened to winning Willy Wonka’s golden ticket, and Freeman, 64, said she gave up her dreams of a brick-and-mortar business because of her notoriety. Giuliani’s “crazy lies” turned their lives upside down, Moss said, flooding their phones and social media accounts with what their attorneys called a racist and vicious “campaign of defamation and emotional terror” and leaving Moss with depression and anxiety disorders.
Strangers accused the women of treason and threatened to hang them, including one caller who proposed it be done close enough to the U.S. Capitol “for people to hear their necks snap,” according to her testimony and recordings played in court. Harassers sent pizza deliveries to Moss’s home that she was expected to pay for, one addressed to a person whose first and last name sounded like the n-word racial epithet.
“I was afraid for my life. I literally felt someone would be coming to hang me, and there was nothing anyone could do about it,” Moss testified.
Plaintiffs’ attorneys led by Gottlieb and Von A. DuBose said Giuliani and co-conspirators made the two civil servants’ names “synonymous with crimes, cheating and fraud” in an unprecedented media campaign to overturn the election.
Moss said she began to feel like a pariah at work, even though lies about her had been debunked. She changed her hair and physical appearance, while her ninth-grade son failed all his final exams after the attacks. She and Freeman moved their homes and gave up some of their dreams, they testified.
Freeman testified that she was an independent business person living in her home of 20 years when Giuliani publicly shared security video of her wearing a “Lady Ruby” T-shirt, her chosen nickname and brand for her traveling clothing boutique.
“You are dead,” one person wrote her on social media. “Your family and you are now criminals and traitors to the union. BLM wants the cops to go away, good they are in the way of my ropes and your tree.”
Freeman told the jury that, in addition to suffering, she lost her brand and reputation.
“That’s the only thing in life, the only thing you have is your name,” she testified through tears. “My life is just messed up, all because of somebody putting me out there on blast, tweeting my name out.”
The damages verdict, if upheld, cannot be discharged through bankruptcy, legal analysts said. The penalty adds to the serious legal threats facing Giuliani, a 2008 Republican presidential candidate who branded himself “America’s mayor” after leading New York City following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
In addition to his pending state prosecution with Trump in Georgia, he and one of his lawyers are being sued by Hunter Biden for allegedly mishandling the presidential son’s laptop, and that lawyer is accusing Giuliani of not paying legal bills. Giuliani also faces a suit from a former employee accusing him of wage theft and sexual harassment. His law license has been suspended in New York in disciplinary proceedings, so he can no longer practice.
Giuliani has pleaded not guilty in the Georgia criminal cases and denied all claims of wrongdoing in all cases.
Still, Giuliani even on the first day of trial renewed his accusations against Freeman and Moss, in what the judge warned could be grounds for a fresh defamation claim.
“Everything I said about them is true,” Giuliani told reporters in media footage played to jurors by attorneys for Freeman and Moss in closing arguments. Giuliani added: “Of course I don’t regret it. … They were engaged in changing votes.”
A co-defendant dismissed earlier from the lawsuit, One America News, entered a settlement with Moss and Freeman and reported that Georgia officials concluded “there was no widespread voter fraud by elections workers who counted ballots at the State Farm Arena.”
Amy Gardner contributed to this report.
