Left: Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani arrives to address reporters outside the Merrimack County Superior Court, Wednesday, Oct. 4, 2023, in Concord, N.H. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)/ Right: Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, a former Georgia election worker, testifies as her mother Ruby Freeman listens at right, before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday, June 21, 2022. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Rudy Giuliani, the former attorney to Donald Trump and onetime New York City mayor, is expected to appear in court Thursday in Washington, D.C., as jury selection gets underway for a civil defamation trial to determine damages owed by him to former Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss.
The trial is expected to take just a few days and will unfold at the E. Barrett Prettyman courthouse in Washington. The women sued Giuliani in December 2021 claiming he defamed them repeatedly through a widespread public smear campaign which falsely declared that they had manipulated ballots at the State Farm Arena in Fulton County, Georgia, to rig the election against Donald Trump in favor of now-President Joe Biden.
The women were badly harassed in the wake of those claims and were subject to death threats and intimidation. At one point, Freeman, then 62, was forced to go into hiding and flee her home of 20 years. Both were forced to quit the election work jobs they loved, as well. When Freeman testified before the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol, she told investigators there was “nowhere” she felt safe.
The women are expected to testify at the trial about this and other experiences.
Giuliani was a no-show at the last pretrial hearing last week and drew considerable ire from U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell. The absence was not, according to Giuliani’s attorney Joseph Sibley, advertent. Despite Howell’s order in September that the former New York City mayor attend all hearings in person, Sibley said he misunderstood her ruling and took the blame. Howell bristled, asking him if he was “falling on his sword” for his client. Sibley said he was not.
Howell has been tough on Giuliani in the run-up to the civil trial and as he missed deadlines, telling him this August that he had undermined discovery demands in what should have been a “straight-forward defamation” case, a 57-page ruling stated.
She warned him then that the “cloak of victimization” he donned on the public stage wouldn’t work in court.
Ultimately, she found him liable civilly for defaming Freeman and moss, inflicting emotional distress engaging in a civil conspiracy.
This July, he admitted to making false statements about the women in a two-page no-contest stipulation. In the stipulation, he asserted that for the purposes of the lawsuit, “to the extent the statements were statements of fact and otherwise actionable, such actionable factual statements were false.”
The stipulation also noted Giuliani did not dispute that his statements “carry meaning that is defamatory per se.”
Freeman and Moss seek damages ranging from $15.5 million to $43 million.
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