Giuliani won’t testify in defamation trial, closing arguments underway

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/12/14/giuliani-defamation-trial-testimony-georgia-election-workers/

 

Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani declined to take the stand Thursday to defend himself in a federal lawsuit filed by two Georgia election workers, who say his baseless claims that they stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump destroyed their reputations and exposed them to a torrent of vicious threats and insults.

Despite his repeated statements that he expected to testify in his defamation damages trial, Giuliani’s defense passed on Thursday morning, moving the four-day-old trial to closing arguments after attorneys for plaintiffs Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss rested their case. The pair are asking a federal jury in Washington, D.C., to award them up to $47 million in damages after U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell found Giuliani liable by default in August based on his admissions and failure to turn over evidence in the case.

Giuliani’s decision was not a surprise, since defendants very rarely risk testifying at trial. In Giuliani’s specific situation, he is already facing criminal indictment in a Georgia 2020 election case, and identified as an uncharged “Co-Conspirator 1” in Trump’s federal election obstruction case, meaning he could have had to repeatedly assert his 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination in cross-examination.

Still, he has said, and his attorney told jurors in opening statements, that Giuliani would be the main defense witness.

“I intend to [testify],” Giuliani told reporters Wednesday night, “but it’s best always to leave them guessing. When I was a prosecutor, the defense wouldn’t tell me who the witnesses were.”

An attorney for Freeman and Moss, Michael Gottlieb, launched closing statements quoting from Giuliani’s post 9/11 memoir, “Leadership,” describing his time as Mayor of New York.

“His father always told him, never pick on someone smaller than you,” Gottlieb said. “Never be a bully. Those are wise words if only Mr. Giuliani had listened.”

“The defense strategy in this case is no secret,” the attorney continued. “Rich famous people have valuable reputations, and ordinary people are irrelevant, replaceable, worthless. Mr. Giuliani’s defense is his reputation, his comfort and his goals are more important than those of Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. That is a fiction and it ends today.”

The trial started Monday, and both women gave tearful testimony before the plaintiffs rested their case Wednesday night.

Earlier in the week Freeman described the comfortable life she was living as an independent business executive, in a house she’d lived in for 20 years, until Dec. 4, 2020, when nasty, racist messages began streaming in after Giuliani said she submitted thousands of false ballots for Joe Biden in the presidential election.

She went to a police station and handed her phone to a lieutenant, who answered some of the threatening calls. Then, it got worse.

“They started coming to the house with bullhorns,” Freeman said. “Now you’re actually coming to the house? I was scared. I was scared because I didn’t know, now they’re coming to kill me. I was just scared.”

Freeman had to abandon her longtime home, and subsequent months saw her moving from place to place with her belongings in her car. She wept as she described feeling homeless.

Freeman said the false claims ruined her reputation, and quashed her dreams of expanding her clothing boutique called “Ruby’s Unique Treasures.” She was wearing a “Lady Ruby” T-shirt while working as an election official in Atlanta on Nov. 3, 2020, which was how people quickly tracked her down once Giuliani publicly identified her.

The threats came through voice mail, email, text message, Facebook Messenger and Instagram. “You are dead,” one person wrote. “Your family and you are now criminals and traitors to the union. BLM wants the cops to go away, good they are in the way of my ropes and your tree.”

She testified that she had hoped to open a brick-and-mortar store, but can’t use her name or advertise anymore.

“I don’t have my name anymore,” Freeman said through tears. “That’s the only thing in life, the only thing you have is your name. My life is just messed up, all because of somebody putting me out there on blast, tweeting my name out.”

On Wednesday, a marketing professor at Northwestern University testified that a group of 16 defamatory online and media mentions of Freeman and Moss, beginning in December 2020, were seen about 35 million times. To repair the two women’s reputations with a campaign across the same media platforms, with each message repeated five times for impact, would cost $47 million, Ashlee Humphreys testified.

This is a developing story and will be updated.