Giuliani ordered to pay $148M for spreading lies about Georgia election workers

Rudy Giuliani must pay about $148 million in damages to two former Georgia election workers whose lives were upended after the former New York City mayor falsely accused them of manipulating ballots in 2020, a federal jury determined Thursday.

The eight-member panel awarded Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss about $16 million apiece for claims that Giuliani defamed them, as well as $20 million apiece for the emotional distress they experienced after Giuliani’s allegations were followed by a deluge of threats, harassment and professional consequences.

The jury of Washington, D.C., residents also determined that Giuliani must pay $75 million in “punitive” damages, a penalty intended to deter him and others from engaging in similar smear campaigns in the future.

The verdict came after about 10 hours of deliberations and an unusual four-day trial in which the jury’s only task was to make damage awards, since U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell already ruled Giuliani liable due to his failure to comply with her earlier orders to turn over evidence related to the case.

It’s unclear how much of the massive judgment — if any — Freeman and Moss will ever receive. Giuliani, 79, is reportedly in dire financial straits, and he has at times turned to Donald Trump’s political action committee for help paying his legal bills. The judge found that he shielded evidence of his net worth, and lawyers for Freeman and Moss even alluded during their closing arguments to the prospect that Giuliani would not be able to pay any judgment.

Giuliani, who was ordered by Howell to attend the trial, was in the courtroom as the verdict was read. It followed a four-day trial featuring live and recorded witnesses, including powerful and emotional in-person testimony from Freeman and Moss themselves.

Their lawyers had urged the jury to award the women $24 million apiece for Giuliani’s defamation and unspecified additional amounts for infliction of emotional distress over the claims, which they say ignited years of threats and devastated their mental health. They also asked for an unstated sum in punitive damages to deter others from outrageous conduct.

At the time of the initial allegations against Freeman and Moss, fueled by a grainy surveillance video of ballot counting at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena on Election Day 2020, Giuliani was serving as the head of then-President Trump’s legal defense team. Trump later amplified Giuliani’s lies about the two women.

Trump has never been a defendant in the suit, but the judge ruled that, under a theory of civil conspiracy, Giuliani was liable for Trump’s statements about the election workers.

During arguments to the jury Thursday, an attorney for Freeman and Moss left no doubt that the pair consider the falsehoods promulgated about them to be part of a strategic plan by the Trump campaign aimed at trying to keep Trump in office.

“He had no right to offer defenseless civil servants up to a virtual mob in order to overturn an election,” a lawyer for the women, Michael Gottlieb, said of Giuliani. “The cost that has [been] imposed on Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss, on all those he has deceived, and to the public confidence in our democracy are incalculable.”

Giuliani told reporters earlier in the week that he intended to testify in his own defense, but on Thursday morning he passed up the chance to take the stand.

His attorney Joseph Sibley told jurors the decision was aimed at sparing Freeman and Moss — whose emotional testimony this week he described as genuine and credible — further trauma.

“These women have been through enough,” Sibley said in his remarkable closing statement, calling his own client “irresponsible” for stoking false claims against Freeman and Moss without conducting an investigation.

Still, Giuliani’s decision not to take the stand seemed to reduce further his stature at a trial where he already seemed far diminished from the role he played when he came to prominence in the 1980s as a swashbuckling U.S. attorney in Manhattan and later as mayor during the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Sibley also sought to build sympathy for his client by suggesting at times that he’s not as sharp as he was earlier in his career.

“Rudy Giuliani’s a good man,” Sibley told the jury. “He hasn’t exactly helped himself with some of the things that have happened in the last few days. … My client, he’s almost 80 years old.”

Sibley’s central argument to the jury was that it shouldn’t get carried away when assessing damages. He said the plaintiffs were seeking a “catastrophic … Hollywood-type” award.

Earlier in the trial, Sibley bristled at the limits he faced in trying to mount a defense for Giuliani at a trial where the most critical issues had already been decided against him.

“We just have to roll over and get kicked?” Sibley complained Tuesday.

Howell acknowledged that the defense lawyer’s latitude to challenge the plaintiffs’ case was sharply constrained, but said that was a result of Giuliani’s prior defiance in the case.

“It’s sort of unchartered territory,” she said to Sibley. “You’ve got a difficult job.”