Rudy Giuliani can’t even afford to lie about random people anymore.
A federal judge in Georgia ordered Giuliani on Wednesday to forfeit a defamation suit filed by two poll workers, whom he falsely claimed had tampered with ballots after the 2020 election. The judgment comes as Giuliani’s legal bills mount, with the former mayor recently admitting in a court filing in another defamation suit that he is essentially broke — to the point that he is selling his $6.5 million co-op on the Upper East Side. And the Trump ally faces more courtroom battles: Giuliani turned himself in last week as part of the former president’s alleged conspiracy to overturn the election results in 2020.
Strangely, Giuliani essentially lost the defamation case in Georgia because of his financial struggles. Giuliani stated in court in Georgia on Wednesday that he could no longer contest that he made defamatory statements made against poll workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss because he could no longer pay to access his own electronic records, which were seized by the FBI when they took his phones in 2021. Since then, he has been paying a $20,000-per-month hosting fee to access his records.
Judge Beryl Howell, who was overseeing the case, also ordered Giuliani to forfeit because he had only handed over a “sliver” of relevant documents in discovery — though Giuliani did provide “blobs of indecipherable data.” Giuliani’s lawyers stated on Thursday that the forfeiture did not mean that he admitted wrongdoing but was simply an effort to avoid an expensive discovery process. But according to Howell, Giuliani’s defense that he was protected by the First Amendment had “more holes than Swiss cheese.” Howell declared him liable for “defamation and the intentional infliction of emotional distress.” (A spokesperson for Giuliani told Intelligencer that the ruling was a “prime example of the weaponization of our justice system, where the process is the punishment.”) Following Giuliani’s false claims about Freeman and Moss, the pair were subject to a vicious harassment campaign by Trump supporters.
“Donning a cloak of victimization may play well on a public stage to certain audiences, but in a court of law, this performance has served only to subvert the normal process of discovery in a straightforward defamation case,” Howell wrote. A trial to determine the amount of damages is expected to begin within the next year, and Giuliani could be on the hook for millions of dollars.
Giuliani has paid almost $90,000 for Freeman’s and Moss’s attorneys fees and owes hundreds of thousands of in assorted legal fees and fines. More costs are expected to mount as he prepares for his defense in Georgia, in a defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems, and in a sexual-harassment case unrelated to his work with Trump. But at least his boss is starting to pitch in: After Trump refused Giuliani’s desperate requests to pay his legal bills, Trump agreed to host a $100,000-per-plate fundraiser on September 7 for his loyal henchman.
