A federal jury on Friday determined that Rudy Giuliani, who’d already been found liable for defaming a pair of Georgia poll workers after the 2020 election, must fork over $148 million in damages to the women, who gave emotional testimony about how Giuliani’s lies made their lives hell.
Giuliani, 79, pulled out of testifying as planned at the last second Thursday, leaving it up to his attorney, Joe Sibley, to do his bidding. He was photographed smiling as he walked into court Friday, holding a disposable Starbucks cup.
The jury, which was tasked only with determining how much to award in damages, reached its decision after two days of deliberations.
Sibley argued that Giuliani was merely one man in a sea of hundreds of prominent Republicans who spread rumors that Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, were illegally counting votes for Joe Biden during the 2020 election—a conspiracy that was quickly proven to be a farce.
That argument didn’t sway U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell in August, when she found him liable for his role in the women’s harassment, and it did little to convince an eight-person jury this week that Moss and Freeman didn’t deserve millions.
Specifically, the jury awarded each woman $16 million for claims that Giuliani defamed them, as well as $20 million apiece for the emotional distress they experienced after Giuliani’s lies were acted upon by election deniers. The jury also ordered Giuliani to pay $75 million in “punitive” damages, a penalty intended to deter him and others from committing similar offenses.
Given Giuliani’s well-documented money troubles, it’s unclear how much—if any—money Moss and Freeman will actually receive in damages.
Speaking outside the courthouse Friday, Giuliani said the amount awarded to the women was “absurd,” adding that he plans to appeal the decision. He said he didn’t testify as planned because he feared Howell would hold him in contempt of court.
“I don’t regret a damn thing,” said Giuliani, according to WUSA9.
During the week-long trial, Giuliani was at odds with Howell in their limited speaking engagements, with the judge grilling him at least twice for his behavior outside the courtroom, which included him bizarrely declaring Monday that he doesn’t regret pushing conspiracies about Moss and Freeman.
“They were engaging in changing votes,” Giuliani told reporters at the time, promising to divulge more in his testimony that never came.
Howell scolded Giuliani and Sibley to start proceedings on Tuesday, threatening that Giuliani’s comments the day prior “could support another defamation claim” and that he’d be held in contempt of court if he spoke similarly while testifying.
Giuliani’s tirade appeared to even tick off Sibley, who apologized in court, saying that he “can’t control everything” Giuliani does, especially outside the courtroom. He added later that day, “My client, as you saw last night, likes to talk a lot, unfortunately.”
The scolding did little to stop Giuliani from getting in his own way. The former New York City mayor and Donald Trump confidant still couldn’t bite his tongue outside court, taking a shot at the poll worker’s attorney and Howell after Tuesday’s hearing, telling reporters he can’t say too much because it will “annoy the judge.”
While Giuliani’s theatrics outside the chambers did him no favors, the emotional testimony of Freeman and Moss was at the heart of the trial.
Moss testified that Giuliani was “driving the bus” of conspiracies that forced her to move, change her appearance, and fear for her life, everyday worrying that she’d be attacked on her walk to work and be left “dying on the street.”
Freeman gave equally chilling testimony, describing how she received emails from people who threatened to have her lynched.
“You are dead,” read one email displayed in court, according to Law & Crime. “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.”
Other messages were equally horrifying, with another allegedly saying, “Ms. Ruby safest place for you right now is in prison. Or you will swing from the trees.”
Those hateful messages, which the women said continued into 2023, came after Giuliani went public in Dec. 2020 with a video he claimed was proof that the women had taken fake ballots from a suitcase and submitted them as real. He shared the women’s names, and they soon had loony conspiracists at their front door—ringing their doorbell in the middle of the night and protesting on their street.
The women argued they deserved to be compensated by the millions because their lives were flipped upside down, with their once mostly anonymous lives now forever associated with a nasty conspiracy. They said their names had been dragged through the mud, never to be separated from this saga that brought them what they described as being the worst years of their lives.
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