As I write, a federal jury in Washington, D.C., is deliberating how much Rudy Giuliani should pay two former Georgia election workers whom he falsely accused of smuggling and counting phony absentee ballots at Atlanta's State Farm Arena after the 2020 presidential election.* The former Trump campaign lawyer did not help his case by insisting that his wild claims about Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, who are mother and daughter, were actually true, contrary to what Giuliani's lawyer conceded during the trial and contrary to what Giuliani himself said in a "nolo contendre stipulation" he filed last July.
"When I testify," Giuliani said outside the courthouse on Monday, "you'll get the whole story, and it will be definitively clear what I said was true." He said he would show that Freeman and Moss were in fact "engaged in changing votes." Those comments were reminiscent of Giuliani's repeatedly broken promises to present "conclusive proof" that the 2020 election was rigged, something he never managed to do. True to form, Giuliani announced on Thursday that he would not testify after all.
Giuliani's lawyer, Joseph Sibley, told the jury that decision was motivated by a desire to spare the plaintiffs' feelings. "These women have been through enough," said Sibley, who conceded that Giuliani had been "irresponsible" when he repeatedly claimed they had helped Joe Biden steal the election.
Evidently that is not how Giuliani sees it, since he was insisting just a few days ago that he had not actually defamed Freeman and Moss. Sibley alluded to Giuliani's intransigence when he urged the jury to go easy on his client. "Rudy Giuliani's a good man," Sibley said. "He hasn't exactly helped himself with some of the things that have happened in the last few days."
Sibley sought to minimize Giuliani's role in promoting the false claims about Freeman and Moss. Referring to the "now-infamous video" from State Farm Arena that Giuliani cited as evidence of the women's supposed chicanery, Sibley noted that "it was made by somebody else." But he added: "I'm not excusing the conduct. It's not excused."
Giuliani's recent reassertion of the calumny at the heart of this case was especially puzzling because he stipulated in July that his statements about Freeman and Moss were "defamatory per se" and that "to the extent the statements were statements of fact and other wise actionable, such actionable factual statements were false." The following month, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell ruled that, because Giuliani had willfully failed to meet his discovery obligations, he was liable for defamation by default. The jury's task therefore was limited to assessing damages.
Although Giuliani's renewed insistence on the truth of claims that his own lawyer called "irresponsible" did not seem like a smart legal strategy, it was consistent with the reckless conduct that provoked this defamation lawsuit. In the December 2021 complaint that Freeman and Moss filed against Giuliani and One America News Network (OAN) in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, they noted that Giuliani had repeatedly claimed the surveillance video from State Farm Arena, where Fulton County absentee ballots were tallied, showed that election workers, including two individuals eventually identified as Freeman and Moss, intentionally counted a massive number of fake ballots.
On December 3, 2020, Giuliani and other members of Donald Trump's legal team testified before the Georgia Senate about alleged election irregularities. A Trump campaign representative said the purported fraud at State Farm Arena involved 18,000 ballots. She referred to "suitcases of ballots [stored] under a table, under a tablecloth"; identified the election workers as "the lady in purple," "two women in yellow," and "the lady with the blond braids also, who told everyone to leave"; and stated that "one of them had the name Ruby across her shirt somewhere."
Giuliani amplified those claims on Twitter that day. He retweeted a post in which fellow Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis averred that "thousands of ballots" were "pulled from under a table in suitcases and scanned." And he claimed the evidence of that crime was irrefutable: "The video tape doesn't lie. Fulton County Democrats stole the election. It's now beyond doubt."
The next day, Giuliani sent three tweets in the same vein. He asserted that "the Georgia middle of the night theft of thousands of votes changes everything." He said questioning that conclusion was "like disputing a bank robbery when you have 4 cameras showing the robbery." And he promoted a podcast in which he said he would "examine the VIDEO EVIDENCE."
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (a Republican who supported Trump's reelection) and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation looked into these claims and found no evidence to support them. In a December 4, 2020, tweet, Gabriel Sterling, Georgia's voting implementation manager, said "the 90 second video of election workers" that supposedly proved outcome-altering fraud actually "shows normal ballot processing." He elaborated on that conclusion in a lengthy Newsmax interview that evening.
In his tweet, Sterling cited a debunking by Lead Stories. Georgia Public Broadcasting and PolitiFact weighed in with their own refutations. At a December 7 press conference, Raffensperger and Sterling reiterated the conclusion that Giuliani's allegations were without merit.
Undeterred, Giuliani identified Freeman by name during a December 23, 2020, podcast, describing her as someone with "a history of voter fraud participation." Not only were there fake ballots, he said, but they were counted multiple times. "It's quite clear, no matter who they're doing it for, they're cheating," he added. "It looks like a bank heist."
On another podcast two days later, Giuliani said "Ruby Freeman and her crew" got "everybody out of the center" with a "false story" about a "water main break," and then "all of a sudden the crooks sprang into action." He repeated the story during a December 30, 2020, podcast and an OAN interview the same day. "For a hundred years," he said on OAN, "this film will show" that "there was an attempt to steal" the 2020 election.
Trump brought up the debunked claim yet again during the notorious January 2, 2021, telephone conversation in which he urged Raffensperger to "find" the votes necessary to overturn Biden's victory in Georgia. Based on "the tape that's been shown all over the world," Trump referred to "the phony ballots of Ruby Freeman," which he said totaled "18,000." He called her "a professional vote scammer and hustler," saying that "reputation" was "known all over the internet."
Raffensberger patiently rebutted that claim once again: "You're talking about the State Farm video. And I think it's extremely unfortunate that Rudy Giuliani or his people…sliced and diced that video and took it out of context." The "full run of the tape," he explained, showed that nothing untoward had happened. When Trump asserted that Georgia election workers "put the votes in three times," Raffensperger replied that no such thing had happened: "We did an audit of that, and we proved conclusively that they were not scanned three times."
Two days later, Sterling held another press conference to rebut the allegations that Trump had made during the phone call. Although Trump's lawyers "had the entire tape," he complained, they "intentionally misled the State Senate, the voters and the people of the United States about this."
Giuliani continued the deception in OAN interviews the same month, that June, that July, and that December, less than two weeks before Freeman and Moss filed their lawsuit. OAN—which had repeatedly accused Freeman by name, including segments in which Giuliani did not appear—reached a settlement with her and her daughter in May 2022. That left Giuliani as the sole remaining defendant in the case.
During the trial, Freeman, who is black, testified that she and her daughter had received hundreds of threatening and frequently racist letters, phone calls, and messages from Trump supporters outraged by the imaginary fraud that Giuliani had described. "This just all started with one tweet," she said. "They messed up my name. They messed up my business."
According to the lawsuit, Freeman was "ultimately forced to change her phone number and email address." Strangers "camped out at Ms. Freeman's home and/or knocked on her door." She received pizza deliveries she never ordered and abusive Christmas cards. She "lost friendships" and was "forced to deactivate the social media pages for herself and her business, Lady Ruby's Unique Treasures, a pop-up clothing boutique."
On January 6, 2021, the day of the Capitol riot by Trump supporters, the complaint says, "a crowd surrounded Ms. Freeman's house, some on foot, some in vehicles, others equipped with a bullhorn. Fortunately, Ms. Freeman had followed the FBI's advice and had temporarily relocated from her home. She was not able to return for two months." She later installed "eleven cameras and three motion sensors in an effort to safeguard her own home."
During the trial, Freeman said she eventually felt compelled to move. At her new address, she strove to keep her identity a secret from neighbors and was even leery of receiving bills in her name. "I miss my old neighborhood because I was me," she said. "I could introduce myself. Now I don't have a name really."
The fallout for Moss was similar. "I was afraid for my life," she testified. "I literally felt like someone [was] going to come and attempt to hang me and there's nothing that anyone will be able to do about it." To this day, she said, she rarely leaves her house and suffers from nightmares and panic attacks.
Giuliani "has no right to offer defenseless civil servants up to a virtual mob in order to overturn an election," Michael Gottlieb, the lawyer representing the plaintiffs, said during his closing argument. "The cost that has imposed on Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss, on all those he has deceived, and to the public confidence in our democracy [is] incalculable."
Sibley sought to deflect responsibility for that damage away from Giuliani. "I have no doubt that Mr. Giuliani's statements caused harm," he told the jury. "No question about it." But he argued that the main culprit was The Gateway Pundit, which identified Freeman and Moss by name after Giuliani promoted the video that supposedly caught them cheating. The women also have sued Gateway Pundit publisher Jim Hoft, whose lawyers say the site merely "reported on the claims made by third parties, such as Trump's legal team."
In his comments on Monday, Giuliani conceded that the plaintiffs' ordeals, which he attributed to "other people overreacting," were "unfortunate." Still, he said, "Everything I said about them is true." Alluding to that assertion, Moss told Sibley, "I personally cannot repair my reputation at the moment because your client is still lying on me and ruining my reputation further."
A March 2023 report from Raffensperger's office reiterated that "all allegations made against Freeman and Moss were unsubstantiated and found to have no merit." But as usual, Giuliani is unfazed, claiming to have evidence he is not ready to share even when he is facing ruinous financial liability.
*Update: The jury on Friday awarded Freeman and Moss a total of $148 million in damages: $33 million in compensatory damages, $40 million for emotional suffering, and $75 million in punitive damages. After the verdict, Giuliani told reporters he had "no doubt" that his defamatory statements about the plaintiffs "were supportable and are supportable today." Unfortunately, he added, "I just did not have an opportunity to present the evidence that we offered."
The post 'Everything I Said About Them Is True,' Giuliani Insisted Days Before a Jury Debated His Defamation Debt appeared first on Reason.com.
