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Rudy Giuliani must pay $148 million to 2 Georgia election workers he defamed, jury decides
Washington — A federal jury on Friday ordered former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani to pay a total of $148 million to two former Georgia election workers who were at the center of baseless claims he spread in the wake of the 2020 presidential election.
The jury of eight Washington, D.C., residents deliberated for roughly 10 hours across Thursday and Friday before reaching a decision. Jurors heard four days of emotional testimony in the civil trial against Giuliani, who served as former President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer toward the end of his presidency.
The case was brought by Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss, her daughter, who sued Giuliani for falsely claiming they engaged in a fake ballot processing scheme while they served as election workers for Fulton County in the last presidential election.
A federal judge in Washington determined earlier this year that Giuliani was liable for defaming Freeman and Moss, and the jury was tasked with determining how much in compensatory and punitive damages to award the mother-and-daughter pair. Freeman sought compensatory damages of $23.9 million, while Moss was asking for $24.7 million for defamation and an unspecified amount for other damages.
The stunning award of $148 million in total damages far surpasses that total. The jury awarded the following:
- $16,171,000 to Freeman in compensatory damages for defamation;
- $16,998,000 for Moss in compensatory damages for defamation;
- $20 million each, or $40 million total, in compensatory damages for emotional distress;
- $75 million in punitive damages for both
Giuliani, whose net worth and assets are believed to be less than $50 million, remained defiant after the verdict was read in court. Speaking to reporters outside the courthouse, he said the threats the women received in the wake of the election were “abominable” and “deplorable” but said he could still support his baseless claims of voter fraud. He declined to comment further, citing his intent to appeal the judgment.
The Giuliani defamation trial
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Throughout the trial, the jurors heard directly from Freeman and Moss as they described the terror they felt after they were thrust into the public eye after the 2020 election.
Moss said Tuesday that the absentee ballot processing team that she oversaw — which included her mother — did a “perfect job” examining the votes that came into their facility, State Farm Arena in Atlanta, during the election. The mother and daughter both said their lives changed when a conservative outlet, the Gateway Pundit, and Giuliani identified them in security camera videos of the ballot processing facility and falsely tied them to voter fraud.
Giuliani claimed the video showed Freeman and Moss adding fake ballots to the vote count in Joe Biden’s favor and inserting a USB drive into election machines. What followed, according to Freeman and Moss, was a barrage of racist threats. An investigation by the Georgia secretary of state later concluded, “All allegations made against Freeman and Moss were unsubstantiated and found to have no merit.”
“Every single aspect of my life has changed,” Moss said. “I’m most scared of my son finding me or my mom hanging in front of our house.”
Freeman, through tears, testified Wednesday about the hate-filled calls, emails, texts and letters she and her small business received after being targeted online.
“I took it as they were gonna cut me up, put me in a trash bag and take me out to my street,” she said of one note she received. “I felt as if I was terrorized.”
“Ruby Freeman, I hope the Federal Government hangs you and your daughter from the Capitol dome you treasonous piece of s***! I pray that I will be sitting close enough to hear your necks snap,” one individual wrote to Freeman in a message to her business.
Moss was passed up for a promotion and missed out on another job, while Freeman had to close her business and sell her house. The pair testified that they felt as if they lost their identities.
Giuliani had indicated that he would testify in his defense and said outside of court in recent days that he was in no way connected to the violent threats. He ultimately chose not to take the stand on Thursday, the final day of testimony. He continued to make false claims about the pair, despite his acknowledgment earlier in the case that he made untrue statements about them.
“Everything I said about them is true,” Giuliani told reporters on Monday. “They were engaged in changing the votes.” Jurors saw a recording of those new claims during the trial.
Judge Beryl Howell, who oversaw the case and ruled in August that Giuliani defamed Freeman and Moss, expressed concerns about the comments, as did Joseph Sibley, Giuliani’s defense attorney.
Sibley did not call any witnesses of his own during the trial and told the jury he was not contesting the harm the mother and daughter endured because of his client’s behavior. Instead, he opted to focus on the expert witnesses the plaintiffs called to calculate the millions requested in damages, and highlighted other media outlets and personalities who also spread the lies.
“Rudy Giuliani is a good man … he hasn’t exactly helped himself” in recent days, the defense attorney said during closing arguments Thursday. “Rudy Giuliani shouldn’t be defined by what’s happened in recent times.”
The attorney placed blame for the initial harm Freeman and Moss suffered at the feet of the first website to identify them, the Gateway Pundit, and showed the jury a lawsuit the pair has filed against the outlet.
“That’s how the names got out. That’s how everyone knew who they were,” Sibley argued.
The pair’s attorneys, however, contended that injecting the conspiracy theories into media accounts was part of the Trump legal team’s plan.
On Wednesday, Freeman talked about a post-election communications strategy from Giuliani’s team that said she would be a key component used to cast doubt on the 2020 election.
The communications plan referenced the video of Freeman at the Fulton County ballot counting center and said she was engaging in “ballot stuffing.”
“This was a plan from the beginning that if … No. 45 didn’t win, that they had already set this plan up,” she said of Trump, the 45th president, and his allies. She said that, according to the plan, she would be their “culprit.”
The jurors were instructed to consider any damages caused by Giualiani’s co-conspirators in the defamation campaign, including Trump and other allies. Under direct examination, Freeman recalled she heard Trump identify her on a call with Georgia’s secretary of state in January 2021. In that conversation, the former president called her a “professional vote scammer.”
“How mean. How evil. I just was devastated,” Freeman said. “He had no clue what he was talking about.”
One of the two experts called by the plaintiffs testified that Giuliani and his co-conspirators’ lies about Freeman and Moss were seen millions of times online, warranting a campaign to restore their reputation that would cost millions of dollars.
Giuliani’s attorney, however, argued for lesser compensation, arguing that such an effort would likely be useless, since the people who believed Giuliani’s lies would believe them “no matter what.”
Giuliani’s legal team has indicated they could appeal some of the judge’s rulings in the case.
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Homeowners whose properties were swamped by Hurricane Helene’s torrential rainfall face a serious problem beyond drying out: how to pay for the cleanup.
That’s because most Americans, including in the communities ravaged by the massive storm, lack flood insurance.
As the aftermath of the hurricane’s ruinous and deadly route across the Southeast illustrates, the alarming lack of flood insurance coverage among an overwhelming majority of people impacted serves as a cautionary tale for the rest of us, experts say.
Along Florida’s barrier islands that run from St. Petersburg to Clearwater, mansions, single-family homes, apartments, mobile homes, restaurants, bars and shops were completely destroyed or heavily damaged by the storm in minutes. In hard-hit Pinellas and Taylor counties, victims with storm coverage ranged from 25% to 5%, respectively, according to the Insurance Information Institute.
Outside of the Sunshine State, the picture is even more dire, with just 1% of homeowners who sustained flooding from Helene holding flood insurance, the institute said.
One underlying factor is that flooding is not covered by a homeowner’s policy and must be purchased separately, often from the federal government. Flood insurance is required on government-backed mortgages for homes in areas classified as high risk by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Many banks mandate flood insurance in high-risk zones as well, but that doesn’t prevent some homeowners from dropping their coverage once their mortgage is paid off.
Calculations on how many homeowners are at risk and how many are covered vary, but all are disconcerting.
FEMA estimates only 4% of homeowners across the country have flood insurance, even though 99% of U.S. counties have been impacted by flooding since 1996. The Insurance Information Institute offers a slightly higher count, stating that about 6% of U.S. homeowners have flood insurance, with most, or 67%, covered through the National Flood Insurance Program run by FEMA, and 33% via a private insurer.
People have “a false sense of security”
When buying or renting a place to live, most people’s main consideration in deciding whether or not to buy insurance for flooding is whether the property is in a high-risk zone. But that creates a “false sense of security,” according to Georgina Sanchez, a faculty fellow and research scholar at the Center for Geospatial Analytics at North Carolina State University. “This perception can discourage residents from flood insurance,” as occurred in western and northern North Carolina, Sanchez told CBS MoneyWatch.
Sanchez’s center has coordinated its research with the Brooklyn-based nonprofit First Street, which compiled a flood database that allows people to look up individual locations nationwide to access the present and future risk of property flooding in those areas.
“Many of our homes, businesses and infrastructure are situated within 800 feet, or roughly two city blocks, from the edge of the 100-year floodplain,” areas viewed as susceptible to being inundated by floodwaters and used to set insurance rates, said Sanchez.
A recent nationwide study found 24% of locations where people are building to be located in that buffer zone, or immediately outside the 100-year flood zone. “We all love to live near water,” she said. “But we’re at a point where we have to ask, do we want to keep putting people in harm’s way.”