A Washington DC jury has ordered Rudy Giuliani to pay $148.1m to two Atlanta election workers after he spread lies about them, one of the most significant verdicts to date seeking accountability for those who attempted to overturn the 2020 election.
The verdict follows a four-day trial in which Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, her daughter, gave haunting details about the harassment and threats they faced after Giuliani falsely accused them of trying to steal the election in Georgia. The women, who are Black, described how they fled, are afraid to give their names in public, and still suffer severe emotional distress today. Their lawyers asked the jury to award them each at least $24m in damages.
“Most days I pray that God does not wake me up and I just disappear,” Shaye Moss said on Tuesday in testimony that frequently turned tearful.
In her testimony on Wednesday, Freeman said she had been “terrorized”.
“I don’t have a name any more,” she said. “Sometimes I don’t know who I am.”
Their lawyers had asked the eight-person jury to award them at least $48m in compensatory damages and to use their discretion to grant additional punitive damages.
The case is the latest in a series of cases in which plaintiffs have used defamation law to push back on lies spread about them since the 2020 election. The voting equipment vendor Dominion settled with Fox for $787m earlier this year in a defamation case. Freeman and Moss also have a pending lawsuit against the Gateway Pundit, a far-right news outlet. Last year, they also settled with One America News, another far-right outlet. Civil rights groups are turning to defamation law as a new tool to ward off misinformation.
The lies about both women were a cornerstone of efforts by Giuliani and Trump to try to overturn the election results in Georgia. On 3 December 2020, Giuliani tweeted a selectively edited video that he claimed showed Freeman and Moss wheeling suitcases full of ballots out from under a table after counting had concluded for the night. The accusation was quickly debunked by Georgia officials, but Giuliani continued to spread the lie. He also accused them of “passing around USB ports as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine”, when Freeman was passing Moss a ginger mint.
Almost immediately, Freeman and Moss started to receive death threats through the mail, email, social media and voicemail. Many of those racist messages were displayed and played in court this week.
Giuliani refused to turn over documents as part of the case and conceded earlier this year that he made false statements about the women. US district judge Beryl Howell found him liable of defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress and civil conspiracy. The only question for the jury to decide was how much in damages Giuliani should pay.
Joseph Sibley, Giuliani’s attorney, conceded to jurors in his opening statement that his client had done something wrong by making false statements. But over the course of the week, he sought to distance Giuliani from the threats and harassment that resulted from the false statements. He also argued that the tens of millions of dollars they requested were not proportional to the harm they had suffered.
Giuliani did not do himself any favors when it came to his defense. After proceedings concluded on Monday, he spoke to reporters on the courthouse steps, where he insisted that what he had said about Freeman and Moss was true. Sibley said earlier this week that Giuliani intended to take the witness stand in his own defense, but he reversed on Thursday and decided not to.
From the outset, lawyers for Freeman and Moss made it clear that the case was about repairing the reputations of their clients and sending a message to other powerful figures that they could not make similar false claims without consequences.
“Send a message. Send it to Mr Giuliani and to any other powerful figure who is considering taking this chance,” Michael Gottlieb, one of the attorneys for Moss and Freeman, said in closing arguments.
It was a message Moss herself emphasized in her testimony on Tuesday.
“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,” she said.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
