Shaye Moss thought she was getting promoted when her boss stopped by her cubicle on 4 December 2020. But when she stepped into his office, something was amiss – she realized she was the only one smiling.
It would wind up being the day everything in her life turned “upside down”.
For more than two hours on Tuesday, Moss – a former Atlanta election worker – gave haunting testimony explaining how her world was upended after the fateful day when she became aware Rudy Giuliani was falsely accusing her of fraudulently counting mail-in ballots.
“Most days I pray that God does not wake me up and I just disappear,” she said.
Dressed in a black blazer with sparkling, long acrylic nails, Moss’s hand shook as she was sworn in as a witness. She described how she fears her son will come home from school and find her and her grandmother hanging from a tree in their yard. How she pushed everyone close to her away because she didn’t want them to suffer any reputational harm. How she gets anxiety attacks. How she sometimes will have to pull over because she thinks someone is following her.
She also recounted how she became a “pariah” in the elections office and left the job she loved, having worked her way out of the mailroom. How she felt like “the worst mom in the world” when her son failed all of his classes in ninth grade after he started getting harassing messages. How she never goes out alone and has become a “hermit crab”. How she has to be the last customer at the nail salon or hairdresser because she wants to be alone and doesn’t want anyone else to be there.
A therapist diagnosed her last year with major depressive disorder with acute distress.
“That’s my sad life,” Moss told a jury in emotional testimony on Tuesday. “I feel like I’m in a dark place and the only thing that surrounds me are the conspiracies and the lies.”
Giuliani sat silently across the small Washington courtroom from Moss as she recounted all of this. It’s the first time the two have come face to face.
Moss’s testimony is at the heart of a week-long trial in which she and her mother, Ruby Freeman, are asking for up to $43m in damages from Giuliani. US district judge Beryl Howell has already found Giuliani liable for defamation, so the only remaining question for the jury is how much the financial penalty should be. The trial entered its second day on Tuesday.
But the testimony from Moss, who broke down in tears multiple times on the stand, crystallizes the human toll that conspiracies theories stemming from Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election – lies spread by Giuliani – have had on election workers.
Moss asked: “How can someone with so much power go public and talk about something he has no clue about?”
She described her worst nightmare. Opening her front door and finding a crowd with nooses in front, ready to kill her. “People in power, mayors,” she said. “They could do that because of who they are. I’m a nobody,” she said.
“I have these nonstop anxious sweats,” she said. “I never go out. I will not be caught out alone ever. I’m like a hermit crab,” she said. “I was scared. Extremely scared. I’m always scared.”
Moss said she didn’t even know what the word “treason” meant when she received the first Facebook message accusing her of it in early December 2020. She thought it was an old word from the time of “Paul Revere”.
At the time, her son was using her old phone because it could be an internet hotspot. His classes were online and Moss couldn’t afford internet. He started getting so many calls and messages that he would get kicked out of the class, held on the Zoom platform.
The night she learned about Giuliani’s false statements, they listened to the messages together. “I had to tell him racism is real – it comes out,” she said. Later, she would find out her son, a fairly good student, was failing all his classes.
Still, she went back to work to prepare for Georgia’s runoff election in January 2021. “It’s hurtful that’s the way people feel when I’m breaking my back to make sure their vote counts,” she said. Even though she’s 39, she said that she had hoped to retire in the elections office.
The episode also transformed Moss. Before 2020, her life was “lit. It was great,” she said. She was a bubbly presence and would go out socially. And she had a family at work, where employees were asked to put in 12 hours daily, seven days weekly, in the lead-up to the election. Sometimes they would even do eyebrows in the bathroom.
But after Giuliani’s statements came out, people would leave the break room when she came in, she said. She had hoped her interim position leading the absentee section would be made permanent, but it was given to someone else. Moss was still responsible for training them and formalizing standard operating procedure.
“It felt like a slap in the face. I felt that I’m being judged and my job is being taken away from me because of lies,” she said.
She thought it might be a good idea to interview elsewhere and get out of elections. But when she went for an interview at a local Chick-fil-A, the interviewer pulled up an article accusing her of fraud. She was so ashamed and scared she left the interview.
During cross-examination on Tuesday afternoon, Joseph Sibley, Giuliani’s lawyer, sought to undercut the idea that Moss was entitled to tens of millions of dollars in damages. He pressed her to explain why it would cost millions to repair her reputation.
“I personally cannot repair my reputation at the moment because your client is still lying on me and ruining my reputation further,” she said. “We need to make a statement. We need to ensure that the election workers that are still there don’t have to go through this. Hopefully by hitting someone in their pockets, for someone whose whole career has been about their pockets, we will send a message.”
As part of his questioning, he asked Moss to explain why she was not looking for work.
“I have not looked for other work because I’m suffering major depressive disorder and I have a lot of anxiety. I am not going to go to a job where I cannot be my best self,” she said. She became emotional when sharing that she took medication, saying it was not something she liked to discuss publicly.
Sibley also sought to get Moss to concede that the harm she suffered was the direct result of statements made by Giuliani and not others, including the Gateway Pundit, which she and Freeman are also suing for defamation.
“They’re no different. They were all on the same hate train together. Mr Giuliani was just driving the bus, picking up these people, and they were spreading the lies,” Moss said.
Lawyers for Freeman and Moss also played videotaped depositions on Tuesday from Bernard Kerik, Christina Bobb and Jenna Ellis, all of whom assisted Giuliani’s legal efforts to overturn the election. Ellis pleaded her fifth amendment right against self-incrimination in response to nearly all the questions asked (she invoked the fifth or refused to answer a question 448 times in the deposition). At one point, Moss could be seen mouthing “wow” to herself as the deposition played.
Before the jury entered the courtroom on Tuesday, Howell asked Joseph Sibley, Giuliani’s attorney, whether the former New York City mayor was just “playing for the cameras” when he made the comments outside of the Washington DC courthouse on Monday evening saying he would prove everything he said about Moss and Freeman was true.
“When I testify, you’ll get the whole story and it will be definitively clear what I said was true and that whatever happened to them, which was unfortunate if other people overreacted, but everything I said about them is true,” he said. Asked if he regretted what he said, Giuliani said: “Of course I don’t regret it, I told the truth.”
Giuliani has already legally conceded in the past that he defamed Freeman and Moss, who are both Black. His lawyer said on Tuesday he wasn’t sure what Giuliani was doing.
“I’m not sure. He’s 80 years old. It’s taken a toll on him,” Sibley said. Howell then proceeded to press Sibley on whether he had concerns Giuliani had the mental capacity to follow instructions in the trial. “The answer of course is yes, I believe he can follow instructions,” Sibley said. “There are health concerns with Mr Giuliani that make sitting through a multi-day trial, the stress of it.”
Giuliani’s claims against Freeman and Moss have been repeatedly debunked, and they have been formally cleared of any wrongdoing.
Moss also said she saw Giuliani’s comments when she got back to her hotel on Monday evening. “He was just spreading lies about us last night,” she said.
Sibley, Giuliani’s lawyer, said in court on Monday that the damages the plaintiffs were seeking would amount to a civil “death penalty” on his client, who has served as a personal attorney for Trump.
“If you award them what they are asking for, it will be the end of Mr Giuliani,” he said.
