Life for Shaye Moss turned upside down after Rudy Giuliani made life hell for her family.
Three years after spreading a lie that the election worker in Georgia manipulated ballots to rig the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump’s former attorney listened to her in person for the first time as she described the abuse she endured, the pain she lives with, and the overwhelming anxiety she continues to experience.
She testified from the witness stand in a federal courtroom on Tuesday as part of a jury trial that will determine how much Mr Giuliani owes Ms Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman for his defamatory statements in the volatile aftermath of the 2020 election.
He was already found liable for defaming the mother-daughter pair of election workers, whose lives were bombarded with racist threats and harassment fuelled by false claims amplified across social media and right-wing media networks.
Facebook messages called Ms Moss a “dirty f***** n***** b****” . Another told her to “be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920.” A group of people barged into her grandmother’s home to try to make a citizen’s arrest. Her son, using her old phone as a mobile hotspot for his computer in school, received so many abusive messages he was forced to leave class.
“I’m most scared of my son finding me and my mom hanging in front of our house, or having to get news at school that I was killed,” she said. “That’s what I’m most afraid of.”
Working at the elections office eventually became untenable. She applied for a job at Chick-fil-a. During the interview, she was shown an article about her.
She changed her appearance. She lost friends and was forced to end a 10-year relationship. She gained weight from stress. She cries all the time. She’s afraid when she sees cars behind her in her neighbourhood. She’s worried about being seen at her son’s football games. She’s rarely ever alone. Her therapist encouraged her to try, but she was too nauseous from fear to stay out in public.
“It feels like I’m in a dark place and I’m surrounded by lies and conspiracies, like I’m surrounded by a swamp of loneliness and sadness and negativity. … I still feel like I’m in that cycle of eat, sleep, cry, look online,” she said.
“Most days I pray that God does not wake me up and I just disappear.”
The four-day civil trial in Washington DC is among the highest-profile attempts yet to hold members of Mr Trump’s inner circle accountable for their actions in the wake of the 2020 election. His attorneys fear it could be the “civil equivalent of the death penalty” for him.
If jurors impose the tens of millions of dollars in damages the women could be awarded, his attorneys told the jury on Monday that “it would be the end of Mr Giuliani.”
Mr Giuliani has never apologised. When Ms Moss and Ms Freeman returned to their hotel room on Monday night after the first day of the trial, they saw him on TV and hoped he was admitting responsibility. Instead, he falsely claimed that “everything I said about them is true.”
In a court filing, attorneys for the women told the court that if were to say anything resembling those statements on the witness stand, “he would be in plain violation of the court’s prior orders in this case conclusively affirming, and reaffirming, that all elements of liability have been established, including that Defendant Giuliani’s defamatory statements were false.”
In testimony to Georgia lawmakers and on podcast and television appearances after the 2020 election, Mr Giuliani falsely alleged that the women kicked out election observers, concocted a false story about a water main break, trucked suitcases of fraudulent ballots, and passed USB drives loaded with votes for Joe Biden – all of which have been debunked. But those lies were spread widely by right-wing media and the former president himself.
Threats against Ms Moss and Ms Freeman are also at the centre of a sprawling criminal case in Atlanta, where Mr Giuliani is a co-defendant alongside the former president and a dozen others accused of a criminal enterprise to unlawfully overturn the state’s election results in 2020.
He also is an unnamed co-conspirator in a federal election conspiracy case that charges Mr Trump with four crimes connected to his alleged attempts to subvert the election’s outcome.
Rudy Giuliani talks to reporters as he leaves the federal courthouse in Washington on 11 December— (AP)
Mr Giuliani is not contesting that his allegations are false. The federal judge overseeing Mr Giuliani’s civil case has already found him liable for defaming Ms Moss and Ms Freeman, leaving a jury trial to determine just how much Mr Giuliani owes the defendants for their claims of defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, civil conspiracy and punitive damages.
It’s not the first time the women have publicly testified about their story; last year, they were key witnesses for a House select committee investigating the events surrounding the attack on the US Capitol.
On Tuesday, jurors heard how Ms Moss’s formerly “bubbly” personality and otherwise “happy” life dissolved once Mr Giuliani’s lies infected a toxic post-election landscape.
“I am literally not even that same person that was smiling on those selfies,” she said. “Everything’s changed. Everything’s turned upside-down. Everything is different.”
She told the jury that she eventually sought treatment and was diagnosed with acute stress disorder but avoided therapists for a long time. She went back to therapy and was diagnosed with major depressive disorder and acute stress.
“How can someone with so much power go public and talk about things that he obviously has no clue about?” Ms Moss said on Tuesday. “It’s just obvious that it’s lies. It’s hurtful. It’s untrue, and it’s unfair.”
