Jury awards Rudy Giuliani defamation victims $148 million in trial over Georgia election conspiracy theory
- Jurors said Rudy Giuliani must pay Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss $148 million following a defamation trial.
- Giuliani falsely claimed they rigged ballots in Georgia, which Donald Trump lost.
- The ex-mayor declined to testify in the last minute, presenting no defense.
It is the first jury verdict in a defamation trial over conspiracy theories that Donald Trump, rather than now-President Joe Biden, was the true winner of the 2020 presidential election.
The decision is yet another catastrophic legal setback for Giuliani, a man who was once heralded as one of the United States's most powerful and accomplished lawyers.
An earlier, much larger lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News went through the jury selection process but settled at the eleventh hour, with the right-wing media network agreeing to pay $787.5 million. Several other cases — including ones against farther-right media organizations One America News and Newsmax — have also settled, while others are hurtling toward their own trials.
But it is the trial against Giuliani, held in federal court in Washington, D.C., that perhaps best exemplifies both the personal harms of election conspiracy theories and just how starkly the theories cut against reality.
"This case is unprecedented," plaintiff lawyer Michael Gottlieb said in his closing argument. "Because the lies in this case became part of a sustained campaign — the purpose of which was to overturn the election — which had the collateral effect of these lies that rocketed around the world."
In interviews and on his social media accounts, Giuliani, then a personal attorney for Trump, pushed the false claim that Ruby Freeman and Wandrea "Shaye" Moss had produced "suitcases" full of fake ballots from under a table and included them in the vote count while working as election employees in Atlanta.
He cited a grainy, edited clip of security footage that was posted online by Trump's campaign and that, in reality, did not show any such thing.
Giuliani falsely claimed — even after Georgia election officials said the allegations were false — that the video showed Freeman and Moss pulling "illegal" ballots while Republican election observers weren't looking, that they illegally counted some ballots multiple times, and that they "passing around USB ports as if they're vials of heroin or cocaine."
It was all evidence, Giuliani said, that the 2020 election results were wrong and that Trump, not Joe Biden, was the real winner.
A statewide audit of the election results, in fact, concluded that Biden did indeed win the state's electoral college votes. And an investigation from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Georgia's election board found the claims against Freeman and Moss, who counted ballots in the city's State Farm Arena, "have no merit."
One America News, the far-right network where Giuliani made some of his false remarks, and whose own employees made similar false claims, was initially included as a co-defendant in the lawsuit. The company settled with Freeman and Moss in 2022 and issued a statement admitting the two "did not engage in ballot fraud."
In the trial, Freeman and Moss, her daughter, both testified about the damage Giuliani's falsehoods have wrought on their lives. Both received an onslaught of violently racist and sexist threats from Trump supporters against them and their families. They have spent the past few years looking over their shoulders. On one occasion, Freeman testified, Trump supporters banged on her door as she received a barrage of death threats.
"I was terrorized. I was scared. I was scared people were coming to kill me," Freeman told jurors. "They had my address. They had my phone number, my name."
