Washington, 16 December 2023 (tca/dpa/MIA) - A jury in Washington on Friday has ordered former Trump campaign lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani to pay $148 million to two former Georgia election workers who became the targets of violent threats after he accused them of manipulating ballots in the 2020 election.

 

After Giuliani refused to participate in the pretrial discovery process, US District Judge Beryl Howell determined without a trial in August that Giuliani was liable for defamation and that he had engaged in a conspiracy with former president Donald Trump, the Trump campaign, the television network OAN and an OAN personality to defame Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss.

 

Earlier this year Giuliani conceded in a court filing that he made false statements about Freeman and Moss.

 

The sole issue for the eight-person jury to decide was the amount of damages; Freeman and Moss' lawyer asked for at least $24 million each.

 

Over four days jurors heard emotional testimony from Moss and Freeman about how Giuliani's repeated false, defamatory statements about them after the 2020 election upended their lives, causing them to change their appearances, homes and jobs in an effort to avoid the onslaught of graphic and racist messages they received.

 

Giuliani repeatedly claimed the women tampered with ballots to change the election results and amplified misleading security video that he falsely claimed showed them counting ballots after the process had officially concluded.

 

He also accused both women of passing a USB drive like "vials of cocaine or heroin." The women told jurors that the item in question was a ginger mint.

 

Moss and Freeman's attorney Von DuBose aired for jurors hundreds of the threats Freeman and Moss received.

 

DuBose showed jurors a "strategic communications plan" from Giuliani that called for Trump and his surrogates to use the claims about Freeman and Moss to support their unsuccessful efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

 

On Tuesday, Moss testified for hours about living with fear and panic from the flood of threats, including pushing away the people around her because she didn't want to cause them harm and changing her hair color. She said she felt like "the worst mom in the world" when her son failed his classes after receiving hundreds of racist text messages.

 

"Every single aspect of my life has changed," Moss said.

 

She recounted how people broke into her grandmother's home and attempted to perform a citizen's arrest and said her greatest fear was that her son would come home one day to find his mother and grandmother hanging from a tree in the front yard.

 

"How can someone with so much power go public and talk about things he obviously has no clue about. It's obvious lies," Moss said of Giuliani's false claims about her and her mother. "Nothing he said was true."

 

On the courthouse steps Monday, Giuliani told reporters that he didn't regret his actions and again falsely claimed Moss and Freeman rigged votes. The judge scolded him the next day, saying the comments could support another defamation claim by the former election workers.

 

Giuliani told reporters early in the week that "when I testify, the whole story will be definitively clear that what I said was true, and that, whatever happened to them — which is unfortunate about other people overreacting — everything I said about them is true."

 

But ultimately he did not testify on Thursday, though he was the only scheduled witness for the defence. Giuliani's lawyer, Joe Sibley, told the jury that he decided against his client testifying because "these women have been through enough."

 

Instead, he urged jurors to have sympathy for Giuliani and remember the 80-year-old former New York City mayor as a unifying figure after 9/11.

 

"Rudy Giuliani shouldn't be defined by what's happened in recent times," Sibley said. "This is a man who did great things. If he hasn't been so great lately, I want you to judge him by the entire character of who he is."

 

During closing statements, Moss and Freeman's attorney Michael Gottlieb dismissed that idea.

 

"Mr. Giuliani's defence is that his reputation, his comfort, his goals are more important than Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. That is a fiction and it ends today," Gottlieb said.

 

"He has no right to offer defenceless civil servants up to a virtual mob in order to overturn an election. The cost that has [been] imposed on Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss, on all those he has deceived, and to the public confidence in our democracy [is] incalculable."

 

Though it was a civil case, it was the first jury trial specifically related to the Trump campaign's 2020 election subversion efforts, rather than rioters' actions on January 6, 2021. The juror's take on the evidence could provide a preview of the state and federal criminal cases expected to take place in 2024, both of which include charges related to Giuliani's false claims against the election workers.

 

Giuliani is believed to be an unindicted co-conspirator in the federal indictment brought by special counsel Jack Smith and some of the criminal charges against Giuliani in a separate case brought in Georgia stem from his false statements about Freeman and Moss. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis also charged three other people as part of a scheme to try to persuade Freeman to falsely confess to election fraud.