Former Mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani arrives at the federal courthouse in Washington, Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2023. The trial will determine how much Rudy Giuliani will have to pay two Georgia election workers who he falsely accused of fraud while pushing President Donald Trump’s baseless claims after he lost the 2020 election. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
With potential damages that one expert said should cost him as much as $47 million for his defamation of election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, Rudy Giuliani declined to take the witness stand Thursday at his civil trial in Washington, D.C.
His attorney Joseph Sibley did not elaborate when prompted by U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell.
A day before, Ruby Freeman testified for more than an hour. She was frequently overcome with emotion as she relived the terrors she experienced after Giuliani spread baseless claims that she and her daughter Shaye Moss had “cheated” voters in Georgia by stealing ballots and stuffing them into suitcases.
Giuliani had insisted publicly that he saw the women share a USB port containing votes on surveillance footage from State Farm Arena in Fulton County, Georgia, when in fact, it was a ginger mint being passed between them. Extensive investigations determined neither Freeman nor Moss did anything remotely fraudulent during the 2020 election.
But Giuliani’s public remarks decrying them as frauds — and Donald Trump and the Trump campaign’s regurgitation of these lies — prompted waves of vitriol against Freeman and Moss and much of it racist. There were promises to lynch the women, cut them up and kidnap them. There were hundreds of emails and texts and phone calls and letters that flooded their lives, each seemingly worse than the next.
At one point, Freeman was forced to go into hiding and leave her home of 20 years, abandoning a neighborhood and community she deeply cherished. A longtime small businesswoman, Freeman was known as “Lady Ruby” and had a traveling boutique that depended on the good name she had worked hard to establish for herself in Georgia for years.
Giuliani’s lies against her, she testified, ruined her reputation.
This story is developing.
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