A federal jury on Friday returned a verdict awarding plaintiffs Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, $148.17 million in damages in their defamation trial against Rudy Giuliani arising out of his claims that the two election workers committed fraud during the 2020 election in Georgia. The judgment will surely bankrupt him, and the worst is yet to come when he faces criminal charges in Georgia next year for racketeering in connection with his efforts to overturn that election.
How did the man who was once America’s most famous prosecutor — using the same racketeering theories that are now being used against him — end up in the defense box?
Bad lawyering is certainly part of the reason. In the trial last week in Washington, the jury’s role was limited to determining how much he would pay. Giuliani had already conceded that he lied about the two women’s activities. According to a signed stipulation submitted by his lawyers earlier this year, “Defendant Giuliani, for the purposes of litigation only, does not contest that, to the extent the statements were statements of fact and other wise actionable, such actionable factual statements were false.” The stipulation was supposedly intended to “avoid unnecessary expenses in litigating what he believes to be unnecessary disputes.” Giuliani is drowning in legal fees that he can’t afford to pay without help from former President Donald Trump, who he can’t afford to desert, like some of Trump’s other lawyers have done in the Georgia case.
If that were not enough to seal his fate, he also refused to hand over evidence in discovery, leading the judge to sanction him. “The bottom line is that Giuliani has refused to comply with his discovery obligations and thwarted plaintiffs Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ArShaye Moss’s procedural rights to obtain any meaningful discovery in this case,” the judge wrote last summer. “Just as taking shortcuts to win an election carries risks — even potential criminal liability — bypassing the discovery process carries serious sanctions, no matter what reservations a noncompliant party may try artificially to preserve for appeal.”
In a four-day trial last week, the plaintiffs recalled how their lives had been turned upside down and they were plagued with threats after Giuliani repeatedly attacked them. A brief, heavily edited clip of security video was circulated online in which Giuliani claimed the women were “passing around USB ports like they were vials of heroin or cocaine.” In fact, according to the House Jan. 6 committee’s report, they were passing a ginger mint.
The plaintiffs’ lawyer, in closing arguments last Thursday, asked the jury to award the women at least $24 million each in damages. The figures were based on the testimony of the plaintiffs’ expert, a Northwestern University professor who testified that it would cost the two women between $17.8 million to $47.8 million to repair their reputations given the breadth and severity of the widely repeated attacks. As for Giuliani, after saying earlier that he would take the stand and make “definitively clear” that what he said about the two women “was true” — notwithstanding his stipulation to the contrary — he chose not to testify.
It’s easy to second-guess Giuliani’s lawyering in the case. The stipulation that was supposed to save him money will clearly cost him. The discovery violations were a self-inflicted wound. But the real question is why Giuliani put himself in the most vulnerable position of any of Trump’s lawyers, taking the lead in the twisted and ill-thought-out effort to reverse the election. Did he really believe his own lies? Or did a combination of ego and greed lead him to step into the limelight that he has craved throughout his career? He’s still in the limelight, but as a broken man with no obvious way out of his problems and no one to blame but himself. The two women from Georgia will join a growing list of creditors who he already owes. If attention was what he craved, he got it, and now he is facing the consequences. The chickens are coming home to roost.
