Rudy Giuliani sued again by former Georgia election workers over fraud claims
Rudy Giuliani, the former personal lawyer for former U.S. President Donald Trump, arrives to the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. District Courthouse on December 15, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON, D.C. - The two former Fulton County election workers who won $148 million in a defamation lawsuit against Rudy Giuliani are suing the former New York City mayor again for allegedly repeating his claims about them.
On Friday, a jury in Washington, D.C. awarded Wandrea "Shaye" Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman a combined nearly $150 million, the latest in a series of verdicts against Giuliani.
The damages award in the defamation case followed emotional testimony from the election workers, who described receiving a barrage of racist and graphic threats after they became the targets of a false conspiracy pushed by Giuliani and other Trump allies.
Moss told jurors she tried to change her appearance, seldom leaves her home and suffers from panic attacks. Her mother described strangers banging on her door and recounted fleeing her home after people came with bullhorns and the FBI told her she wasn’t safe.
"It’s so scary, anytime I go somewhere, if I have to use my name," Freeman said, gasping through her tears to get her words out. "I miss my old neighborhood because I was me, I could introduce myself. Now I don’t have a name, really."
Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss speak outside of the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. District Courthouse on December 15, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Jurors in the defamation case heard recordings of Giuliani falsely accusing the election workers of sneaking in ballots in suitcases, counting ballots multiple times and tampering with voting machines. Trump also repeated the conspiracy theories through his social media accounts. Lawyers for Moss and Freeman, who are Black, also played for jurors audio recordings of the graphic and racist threats the women received.
The judge overseeing the election workers’ lawsuit had already ordered Giuliani and his business entities to pay tens of thousands of dollars in attorneys’ fees. In holding Giuliani liable, the judge ruled that the former mayor gave "only lip service" to complying with his legal obligations while trying to portray himself as the victim in the case.
A defiant Giuliani vowed Friday to appeal the jury's ruling, calling the damages award to Freeman and Moss, "absurd." Outside Washington's federal courthouse after the verdict, he repeated his claims that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. And in a video later on X, formerly known as Twitter, he insisted he did nothing wrong, and suggested he will keep pressing his claims even if it means losing all his money or ending up in jail.
"If they want to put me in jail for it, if you want to shoot me for it ... you're not going to get me to lie," Giuliani said.
On Monday, Freeman and Moss filed a new lawsuit, seeking to stop the ally of Donald Trump from repeating his claims against them.
The mother and daughter point to statements that Giuliani made both during and after the trial, asking the court to bar him from speaking publically about them.
They are also seeking additional attorney and court costs and any other relief that the court "deems just and proper."
Giuliani is facing a slew of other lawsuits, including another defamation case filed by Dominion in 2021. He was also sued in September by a former lawyer who claimed Giuliani had paid only a fraction of more than $1 million in legal fees racked up from investigations into his efforts to keep Trump in the White House. In May, a woman who said she worked for Giuliani sued him alleging he owed her nearly $2 million in unpaid wages, and he had coerced her into sex. Giuliani has denied the allegations.
An August court hearing in another case, one of Giuliani's lawyer suggested that the former mayor was "close to broke," and unable to pay a number of bills - including a $12,000 to $18,000 tab for a company to search through his electronic records for evidence relating to voting machine company Smartmatic's defamation lawsuit against him, Fox News and others.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.