Rudy Giuliani repeatedly promised that he would use his defamation trial to explain why he falsely claimed two Georgia poll workers helped steal the 2020 election. Instead, he was silent in court. But jurors still heard the words of the former personal attorney for Donald Trump, dating back to the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and extending to as recently as this week.
“Never pick on someone smaller than you. Never be a bully,” said Michael Gottlieb, an attorney for the plaintiffs, quoting from a memoir the former New York mayor wrote after the World Trade Center attacks. It’s a lesson Giuliani said he learned from his father.
“Those are wise words,” Gottlieb said. “If only Mr. Giuliani had listened.”
Instead, Gottlieb said, Giuliani continued to lie about Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss, mother and daughter election workers who testified that they were inundated with vicious threats and racist insults after he falsely accused them of helping fake the Georgia election results to the detriment of Republican incumbent Trump.
Gottlieb was giving a closing statement Thursday after Giuliani, who had repeatedly said he planned to testify in his defamation damages trial, declined to take the stand.
Outside court Monday, Giuliani told reporters that “everything I said about them is true.” He agreed before trial not to contest that his claims about the two women were false; Judge Beryl A. Howell found in August that his comments were defamatory. The jury, which started deliberating Thursday and will continue to do so Friday, is being asked only how much Giuliani owes Freeman and Moss for the avalanche of vitriol that derailed their lives. The pair are asking a federal jury in D.C. to award them up to $47 million in damages.
“Day after day, Mr. Giuliani reminds you who he is,” Gottlieb told the jury. He said Giuliani’s defense strategy was to convince jurors he was more important than the women he defamed: “Rich famous people have valuable reputations, and ordinary people are irrelevant, replaceable, worthless. Mr. Giuliani’s defense is his reputation, his comfort and his goals are more important than those of Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. That is a fiction, and it ends today.”
Gottlieb said that when Giuliani wrote his memoir, the onetime U.S. attorney “appreciated that civil servants are by and large decent people who work to make our country better.” Now, Gottlieb said, Giuliani only cares about himself, continuing to profit off election lies with appearances on right-wing media.
In response, defense attorney Joseph D. Sibley IV said Giuliani did not take the stand out of respect for two women who “have been through enough.” He said that “of course” nothing untoward happened during the Georgia vote count. But Sibley argued that Giuliani shouldn’t have to pay a “catastrophic” amount of money to them because other figures were as or more responsible for disseminating the false claims. And he said no greater good would come from forcing Giuliani to pay a hefty penalty.
“People who believe this stuff are still going to believe it no matter what,” Sibley said. He argued that Giuliani was one of those people.
“Mr. Giuliani is a good man,” he said, while conceding that “he hasn’t exactly helped himself with some of the things that happened in the past few days.”
Sibley added, “I have no doubt that Mr. Giuliani’s statements caused harm. No question about it.” But he said the true “Patient Zero” was the far-right website Gateway Pundit, which identified Freeman and Moss by name in the hours after Giuliani and Trump’s campaign disseminated deceptively edited video of the two women counting votes. Gateway Pundit also faces a defamation suit. Lawyers for publisher Jim Hoft have said in court filings that the site “reported on the claims made by third parties, such as Trump’s legal team.”
“Rudy Giuliani could have stopped all of this,” Gottlieb said. He called his clients “heroes” who stood up to a bully, adding, “Unlike some other people, they testified.”
Defendants very rarely risk testifying at trial. In Giuliani’s specific situation, he is already facing criminal indictment in a Georgia 2020 election case and identified as an uncharged “Co-Conspirator 1” in Trump’s federal election obstruction case, meaning he could have had to repeatedly assert his 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination in cross-examination.
The trial started Monday, and both women gave tearful testimony before the plaintiffs rested their case Wednesday night. Jurors began deliberating over lunch Thursday at about 1:30 p.m.
Earlier in the week, Freeman described her comfortable life as an independent business executive, in a house she’d lived in for 20 years, until Dec. 4, 2020, when nasty, racist messages began streaming in after Giuliani said she submitted thousands of false ballots for Joe Biden in the presidential election.
The threats came through voice mails, emails, text messages, Facebook Messenger and Instagram. “You are dead,” one person wrote. “Your family and you are now criminals and traitors to the union. BLM wants the cops to go away, good they are in the way of my ropes and your tree.”
Then it got worse. “They started coming to the house with bullhorns,” Freeman said. “I was scared. I was scared because I didn’t know [if] now they’re coming to kill me. I was just scared.”
Freeman had to abandon her longtime home, and in subsequent months, she moved from place to place with her belongings in her car. She wept as she described feeling homeless.
Freeman said the false claims ruined her reputation and quashed her dreams of expanding her clothing boutique, “Ruby’s Unique Treasures.” She was wearing a “Lady Ruby” T-shirt while working as an election official in Atlanta on Nov. 3, 2020, which was how she was easily tracked down once Giuliani shared the video of her.
She testified that she had hoped to open a brick-and-mortar store but can’t use her name or advertise anymore.
“I don’t have my name anymore,” Freeman said through tears. “That’s the only thing in life. The only thing you have is your name. My life is just messed up, all because of somebody putting me out there on blast, tweeting my name out.”
Moss testified she had dreamed of retiring as a county government worker, as her grandmother did. Instead, suffering from panic attacks and depression, she quit a $39,000-a-year job in the county election office that she had compared to winning a golden ticket from Willy Wonka. “I didn’t make it,” Moss said, verging on tears. “I was afraid for my life. I literally felt someone would be coming to hang me, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.”
On Wednesday, a marketing professor at Northwestern University testified that a group of 16 defamatory online and media mentions of Freeman and Moss, beginning in December 2020, were seen about 35 million times. To repair the women’s reputations with a campaign across the same media platforms, with each message repeated five times for impact, would cost $47 million, Ashlee Humphreys testified.
Sibley argued in closing arguments that there was no way for Giuliani to anticipate that the reaction to his claims would be violent and racist. Gottlieb disputed that in his rebuttal argument, the final words jurors heard before receiving instructions from Howell on how to render a verdict. “He called them drug dealers and criminals,” Gottlieb reminded jurors. Giuliani repeatedly said the two women appeared to be passing around both USB sticks that could alter the election results and vials of drugs. Moss testified that the item her mother handed her during the vote count was a ginger mint.
The reaction to Giuliani’s words from Trump supporters “was foreseeable,” Gottlieb said. “It was inevitable.”
Salvador Rizzo contributed to this report.
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