Rudy Giuliani is the latest Donald Trump associate to see significant legal and financial fallout from his role in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. On Friday Giuliani was ordered to pay $148 million to two Georgia election workers that he defamed, in a Washington D.C. court decision.
The federal civil trial lasted just a week, during which jurors heard testimony from Georgia election workers Wandrea "Shaye" Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman, that Giuliani's provably false statements about them made them a target for violent threats. Here's a part of Moss's testimony from NPR News:
"I was afraid for my life…I literally felt that someone would attempt to hang me and there was nothing anyone could do about it."
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Moss and Freeman also shared threatening voicemails the two received after Giuliani shared video taken from a Fulton County ballot counting center purportedly showing them falsifying ballots. After being found liable for defamation in August of this year, Giuliani himself conceded that his statements about the video were false.
After the decision was announced, Giuliani called it "absurd," and seemed to almost slip into a Trump-like cadence in declaring his belief that the decision will eventually be overturned: "It will be reversed so quickly it will make your head spin, and the absurd number that just came in will help that actually," he reportedly said.
Giuliani has plenty of other legal woes connected with the 2020 election to worry about, too. Back in Fulton County, he's facing more than a dozen charges in a racketeering case, and his financial issues over the last several years have been thoroughly publicized as well.
While Freeman and Moss are obviously pleased with the verdict, the former said that the money can't pay for the time she lost to these threats or the damage to her name (although, encouragingly, one expert witness during the trial stated that it would take a public relations campaign with a price tag of as much as $47.4 million to repair their reputations), and the latter has high hopes for how the decision could serve as an example for the future: "[O]ur greatest wish is that no one, no election worker or voter or school board member or anyone else ever experiences anything like what we went through," she said.
