They say that every trial tells a story, but some trials tell more than one. Rudy Giuliani’s civil defamation trial in Washington, D.C., is a public spectacle because of the notoriety of its defendant, a once-respected man who has descended into grotesque caricature. He has been happy to perform, executing barrel rolls as he pilots his plane into the ground. Attorneys for the plaintiffs, election workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, made their final arguments to the jury on Thursday morning, asking for at least $48 million in compensation for the harm to their reputations from lies Giuliani spread about them in order to assist his client, Donald Trump, in his efforts to contest the result of the vote in 2020. But the trial is not just about Giuliani, or his guilt, which was predetermined by earlier court rulings, with only the size of the damages left to be determined. Much of the testimony this week has instead traced the anatomy of a very modern smear perpetrated by Giuliani and the Trump legal team, who set out to destroy a pair of everyday women. Only fittingly, this version of the story begins with a broken toilet.
More precisely, it all started with a leaky urinal in the State Farm Arena in Atlanta, the big venue where the Hawks play. At around 6 a.m. on Election Day 2020, water started to drip from the ceiling of a room there that was being temporarily used to tabulate absentee ballots — it was coming from the men’s room upstairs. According to a press release that went out later that morning, the room was briefly evacuated while repairs were made and the area was cleaned. “No ballots were damaged,” the release said, “nor was any equipment affected.” Workers quickly returned to the task of tabulating votes in Fulton County, which ended up going overwhelmingly for Joe Biden, helping him to win Georgia by a margin of about 12,000 votes.
Moss, a county employee, was overseeing the tabulation of absentee ballots in the room. Now 39, she had been working for the elections department since graduating from college, starting part time in the mail room before being hired to a full-time position that involved processing absentee ballots. She testified on Tuesday that she loved her job because it involved helping disabled people and the elderly, who greatly appreciated her service. This was Atlanta, after all, where a lot of older Black folks didn’t take their right to vote for granted. In 2020, Moss was given an interim supervisor position, which paid her the same salary as her old job, around $35,000 a year, but came with a lot more responsibility. The raging pandemic had led to a surge in absentee voting. “I was excited to be in charge,” Moss testified. She was expecting that if all went well with the absentee count in 2020, the department might make her supervisor title permanent.
Everyone had forgotten all about the plumbing leak by the time polls closed. The arena was crowded with government workers, reporters, and election observers from both parties. In case all those eyes weren’t enough, Moss’s room was under constant surveillance by security cameras. Across America, citizens were nervously watching the returns, which at first showed Trump with large leads that would shrink over the next few hours and days as the Democratic-leaning absentees were counted. (The day after the election, with 95 percent of the vote in, Trump still led Biden by 37,000 votes in Georgia.) For the employees processing the absentee ballots at State Farm Arena, though, Election Night wasn’t dramatic. It was a repetitive clerical routine: One group cut open envelopes and handed them to the extractors, who put the ballots in trays for a third group, the scanners.
As was typical, the county had hired temporary workers to help out during the rush of election season. One of the temps was Moss’s mother, Ruby Freeman. She was a native of rural southern Georgia, “a Christian,” she would later tell the jury, who had attended segregated schools until sixth grade. Freeman had grown up with casual racism, like most Southerners of her generation, and dealt with it by keeping her distance. (“If they have the audacity to call you the N-word,” she said she learned as a child, “just don’t associate with them.”) For the prior two decades, Freeman had lived in a pretty white clapboard house on a piney road in exurban Cobb County. She had started to work as a street vendor in the 1980s, selling authentic Atlanta Braves apparel outside Fulton County Stadium, where the team used to play. Over time, Freeman testified, the clothing business evolved into a “traveling boutique” called LaRuby’s Unique Treasures.
“I am Lady Ruby,” Freeman said as she introduced herself to the jury on Wednesday. She wore a bright-red turtleneck, a black-and-white patterned blazer, and a pair of dangly earrings. Her hair was dyed blond. “Lady Ruby was special. It meant ‘classy,’ ‘unique.’”
At the plaintiff’s table, Freeman’s daughter intermittently waved a multicolored fan, like one of those characters in the courtroom gallery in an old movie. The table was littered with wrappers from her mother’s favorite ginger-mint candies, to which Lady Ruby attributes healing properties. “I noticed her honor was coughing yesterday,” Freeman said, referring to Judge Beryl Howell. “I wanted to give her one.” The mints, like the plumbing incident, would later prove significant.
Freeman’s name was also her brand. On Election Day, she wore a purple shirt that said “Lady Ruby” on it, and carried a LaRuby purse. She and her daughter worked at the arena from early in the morning until late in the night. The absentee-vote counting was supposed to end for the night at about 10 p.m., and around that time, everyone started to pack up, sealing the opened but uncounted ballots in boxes and stowing them under tables. Many workers went home, as did the party election monitors and reporters. The head of the county elections department, Ralph Jones, had shown up to oversee the end of the day. Frank Braun, an investigator with the Georgia secretary of state’s office, later reviewed surveillance tapes from the arena and testified that there was a discernible moment, at 10:58 p.m., when you could see the mood in the room change. “Ralph gets the phone call,” Braun said, then his shoulders slump, as if to say “Oh my goodness.” The higher-ups had ordered the workers to keep going into the morning. The whole election now hinged on the outcome in a handful of states, including Georgia.
“As you’re watching this,” Braun said, “you’re expecting them to revolt. But they didn’t.” Freeman, Moss, and others retrieved the boxes of opened but uncounted ballots from under the tables, broke the seals, and got back to work. The previous division of labor went out the window, and everyone concentrated on scanning. Braun testified that you could see someone give Ruby Freeman a “quick tutorial” on how to use the scanning machine, which could be ornery. “If you watch the video,” Braun said, “it appears to me that she gets frustrated.” If a ballot was crumpled or food-stained, or the glass on the scanner got smudged, the machine would jam. Whenever that happened, Freeman would have to run the whole batch of ballots through again. Only after she got it right was she allowed to hit the button marked “Accept,” which counted the votes.
This whole process was technically open to the public, but there was no legal requirement that outside monitors be present. After all, the cameras were on, and the videos were public records, as the world would learn on December 3. On that day, Giuliani appeared at a Georgia state senate committee hearing where he urged the legislators to throw out the result of the popular vote, which he claimed was corrupted by fraud. “You are the final arbiter of who the electors should be and whether the election is fair or not,” Giuliani told the legislators. A Texas lawyer named Jacki Pick Deason presented a short, highly edited video of the surveillance footage of the counting that had taken place after 11 p.m., drawing attention to the “lady in purple” and the “lady with the blonde braids also, who told everyone to leave.” The person with braids was Shaye Moss.
Moss has a feeling she knows why she and her mom were singled out by Giuliani and his legal team. “He assumed that because we are Black, we are Dems,” she said during cross-examination by Giuliani’s attorney. “He called us Dems, and he don’t know me from a hole in the wall.”
In fact, there is no evidence that Giuliani or anyone else on his legal team did any real investigation of the surveillance footage or even watched it in its entirety. They gave it to the internet, and they let it do its thing. The official @TeamTrump account on Twitter posted still images from the video with a link to the story on the Trump-aligned network One America News. Trump, his lawyer Jenna Ellis, and Giuliani quickly chimed in with their own posts. Giuliani added three siren emoji and followed up with a series of all-caps tweets:
SMOKING GUN FROM GEORGIA
ELECTION IN GEORGIA IS NOW PROVEN TO BE A FRAUD
The next day, December 4, Giuliani produced an episode of his nightly video podcast in which he went over the surveillance clips like the prosecutor he once was, putting red circles around the people in the footage, narrating what he called their “clandestine” operation to steal the election. In other episodes that month, he would elaborate on his narrative. “A phony excuse of a water-main break was used” to clear the room of observers, Giuliani claimed, conflating the plumbing leak in the early morning with the decision to quit for the night that was later reversed. “Once they were all left and a last check was done around the hall,” he continued, “they scurry under these desks. Hardly where you would keep ballots, right? And they start taking ballots out and then put them on a wheelbarrow sort of thing and wheel them around. And you can see the ballots don’t really look like absentee ballots that are in envelopes. They look more like pristine pieces of paper. And then they’re given out and very quickly are being counted, counted, counted, counted; there are times when it appears that they are being counted more than one time — three, four, five, six, seven, eight times.” At the state senate hearing, Giuliani’s team claimed that the multiple-counted ballots added up to around 18,000 extra votes for Biden, more than enough to swing the election.
“These people should all go to jail,” Giuliani said in the December 4 video. “For a long time.”
Moss and her mother weren’t very politically attuned, so they did not immediately realize that the president of the United States and his lawyers were calling them criminals. Moss testified that she was oblivious to the shitstorm swirling around her when she went to work on December 4. “That was the day that everything changed,” she testified. “Everything flipped upside down.” Toward the end of the day, there was buzz in the office with higher-ups walking around, and Ralph Jones came to Moss’s cubicle and asked her to come in for a meeting. Her co-workers gave her thumbs-ups, thinking her promotion to supervisor was about to be made permanent. When she walked into the office, Moss testified, “I notice I’m the only one cheesing and looking happy.”
“And then I’m shown these videos,” she said. “These lies.”
Investigations by law-enforcement agencies and the Republican-controlled secretary of state’s office would later confirm the obvious: that nothing in Giuliani’s description of events was remotely true. The movements he described as resembling a “bank heist” — stowing the ballots in boxes, pulling them back out, scanning them over and over — were really just the actions of some tired people “working very hard,” Moss said, “to ensure everyone’s vote is counted.”
Giuliani was whipping up expectations within the MAGA movement about what the video might mean. “The Georgia middle-of-the-night theft of thousands of votes changes everything,” he posted on Twitter on the morning of December 4. “Watch it and Biden is not-elect anything.” The news ripped through the conservative-media ecosystem. Internet detectives quickly identified Freeman from the video, likely because of her T-shirt and her LaRuby-branded purse, which would easily lead to the website for LaRuby’s Unique Treasures. The website Gateway Pundit published a post entitled “What’s Up, Ruby? … BREAKING: Crooked Operative Filmed Pulling Out Suitcases of Ballots in Georgia IS IDENTIFIED.” Freeman immediately began receiving a torrent of hateful and threatening messages through a contact portal on her website.
“Cheating ass piece of shit,” read a message that came in through the website at 3:14 a.m. on December 4. “Hope they lock you up and throw away the key, you disgusting bitch traitor.”
“You are dead,” said another message. “Your family and you are now criminals and traitors to the union. BLM wanted the cops to go away. Good. They are in the way of my ropes and your tree.”
Another email, from the address [email protected], read: “We are coming for you and your family. Ms. Ruby, the safest place for you right now is in prison. Or you will swing from trees.”
The messages kept coming in for days, “hundreds, hundreds” of them, Freeman testified. Her page on LinkedIn received so many messages that the network ended up identifying her account as suspicious and shutting it down. People doxed her and found her phone number, and the texts started. (“We know where you sleep” … “I’m coming for you” … “Trash will be taken to the street in bags.”) Then came the phone calls and, when she stopped answering, the voice-mails. “Hey Ruby, we’re going to burn your store down,” one message threatened. Another consisted entirely of a racial slur, repeated over and over in a high, singsong voice.
The same doxers figured out her address, and strangers started to show up. “They’re banging on the door,” she said in a December 5 call to 911, which was replayed in the courtroom. Letters also arrived, including one that came in a red envelope with a “Happy Holidays” postmark, looking like a Christmas card. It was inscribed to “LaRuby” and scrawled with racist bile.
“It was horrible,” Freeman said in court, wiping her eyes with a tissue. She said there now were “a lot of racist people out there who really don’t like me, and it all started with this one person.”
Giuliani sat at the defense table, staring ahead, stroking his chin with the back of his pinky-ringed right hand. Later that afternoon, after Freeman’s testimony, he sought to distance himself from the threats, saying there was no way to determine what had inspired them. “My name isn’t there, it doesn’t refer to me, I don’t even know who those people are,” Giuliani said outside the courthouse. But the evidence showed how Giuliani, acting as the director of Trump’s “Stop the Steal” effort, had eagerly fanned the flames. One of the plaintiffs’ court filings quoted from a text exchange between Giuliani and Boris Epshteyn, another Trump adviser, from December 7. Epshteyn relayed an “urgent POTUS request” for examples of election fraud that were “super easy to explain.”
“The security camera in Atlanta alone captures theft of a minimum of 30,000 votes,” Giuliani texted, inflating the previous estimate. “Remember it will live in history as the theft of a state if it is not corrected by the State Legislature.” Giuliani wondered publicly why Freeman and Moss hadn’t been arrested by the FBI. “They’re still walking around Georgia — why?” he asked at a Georgia state senate hearing on December 10. At that hearing, he boasted that the surveillance video had “gone viral all over the country.” He further elaborated on his prosecutorial narration of the video, suggesting that it showed Freeman and Moss passing around USB drives “like they were vials of heroin or cocaine” and implying they were trying to tamper with voting machines.
In fact, the object on the video was not a USB drive. It was one of Lady Ruby’s ginger mints.
Amid all this madness, Moss was continuing to report to work at her county job. There was another election coming up in Georgia in January, the runoffs for two closely contested U.S. Senate seats. But she felt like a “pariah” around the office. MAGA protesters were jamming the county commissioner’s meetings, demanding her firing. Her co-workers did not believe the wild allegations, but they didn’t want to get anywhere near the controversy. Instead of being promoted, Moss was shunted aside, given lesser duties. She was under the impression she would never touch a ballot again.
Worse than that, Moss felt like she was failing as a mother. She was a single mom, and her son was then a freshman in high school. Like a lot of kids in 2020, he was attending all of his classes online, which meant he was home alone while she was working seven-to-seven at the elections office. Moss couldn’t afford internet at home on her salary, so she had given her son her old cell phone, so he could use it as a hotspot. After she had first learned about the surveillance video, she was an emotional wreck, and she confided what had happened to her son. He told her he now understood why so many people had been calling on her old cell phone. Without thinking it through, she asked him for the phone and they listened to its voice-mail messages together, a decision she would later regret.
You’re going to hang for treason. Why are you running, Ruby and Shaye? Oh it’s going to be epic.
The constant calls were not just traumatizing; they also messed up the hotspot’s connectivity, causing Moss’s son to constantly get electronically booted from class. He had previously been a decent student, but when finals came, he flunked everything. “I feel like it’s my fault,” Moss testified. If she had just stayed in the mail room, maybe none of it would have happened.
Around Christmas, the volume of hateful messages quieted a little, and Freeman and Moss thought that maybe things would return to normal. Trump had lost all of his election-fraud lawsuits, and sooner or later he had to concede the inevitable. Or did he? In late December, the former New York City police commissioner, convicted felon, and Trump-pardon recipient Bernie Kerik emailed a memo to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows: “a strategic communication plan” from the “Giuliani Presidential Legal Defense Team.” Kerik said it was vital to “pull the trigger” on the plan, which he said would culminate on January 6 and would cost between $5 million and $8 million.
The memo outlined potential avenues of attack in each contested state. The first bullet point under Georgia read: “Video of Rudy and Shay [sic] at midnight.” It went on to describe what the team was now calling “Suitcase Gate,” relating that Freeman was “now under arrest and providing evidence” against Stacey Abrams and others on “advanced coordinated effort to commit voter election fraud.” In brackets, the document then added: “[need confirmation of arrest and evidence].” There was no such evidence, because Freeman had never been arrested in her life.
This didn’t stop Giuliani from endlessly repeating that Freeman was a criminal. “Live from Fulton County, let’s watch the Democrats steal the election!” he said in the Christmas Day episode of his podcast. “They wait, they wait, they wait. They check, they check, they check, like they’re gonna do a heist. And all of a sudden, the crooks sprang into action.” He reenacted the absentee-counting process. “One ballot,” he said, and then he mimed feeding a paper into a machine several times, adding little sound effects. “You know what that does? That takes Biden and multiplies it by five.”
The president himself soon joined the attack, bringing up Freeman and “her lovely daughter” repeatedly in his infamous January 2 phone call with Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger. “She’s a vote scammer, a professional vote scammer and hustler, Ruby Freeman,” Trump said. “That was the tape that’s been shown all over the world,” He mentioned a trending catchphrase. “She’s known all over the internet, Brad. She’s known all over. I’m telling you, Where’s Ruby?”
Ruby was about to go into hiding. The last straw came on January 4, with the appearance on her doorstep of a woman named Trevian Kutti, a former public-relations representative for R. Kelly and Kanye West. She had allegedly been recruited to approach her by Harrison Floyd, the head of a political group called Black Voices for Trump. Freeman wouldn’t come to her door, but Kutti told a neighbor that she had been called in from Chicago to offer Freeman assistance. According to Freeman’s testimony before the January 6 commission, Kutti also went to the house of her mother, Shaye’s grandmother, and suggested that Freeman might be put under citizen’s arrest.
Freeman allegedly agreed to meet Kutti at a police station, just so she could figure out what the woman was talking about. According to press reports based on a police video of their interaction, Kutti told Freeman that she was trouble, implying that she should fear the Democrats might kill her, saying “You are a loose end for a party that needs to tidy up.” Kutti put Floyd on speakerphone and suggested he had “authoritative powers to get you protection.” There was reportedly some discussion of immunity, if Freeman admitted to fraud. Freeman later told Reuters that the conversation ended when she jumped up and shouted, “The devil is a liar!”
After her encounter with Kutti, Freeman left her house and went to stay with a friend on the recommendation of the FBI. The next day, January 6, Trump brought Freeman up again in his speech on the Ellipse before his supporters marched off to storm the U.S. Capitol. Down in Georgia, a smaller mob carrying flags and bullhorns massed outside Freeman’s empty home.
“I just felt like, really, this is the former president talking about me,” said Freeman in her testimony. (She refused to refer to Trump by name, generally calling him “45.”) “How mean. How evil … You don’t care that I’m a real person; you’re just executing your plan.”
Many of the people involved in that plan now face the prospect of prison. Trump has been indicted in federal court in Washington on charges related to January 6 and his efforts to overturn the election. He is also the lead defendant in a sprawling conspiracy case brought by Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, who also indicted Meadows, Giuliani, Kutti, and Floyd. (I spotted a man who looked very much like Floyd leaving the courthouse on Thursday, and sure enough, it was reported he was at the trial.) The testimony this week included a video deposition of Jenna Ellis, another Trump lawyer indicted in Georgia, who took the Fifth Amendment more than 400 times. She has pleaded guilty since the deposition was taken and is reportedly cooperating with prosecutors. Even so, it is far from clear that Trump himself will ever be made to pay a price. Hopes that his federal trial in Washington might begin before the election dimmed this week with the news that the Supreme Court intends to review the legal theory underlying the criminal charge brought against him and many other January 6 defendants, threatening a delay, at the least. Trump’s current team of defense lawyers is also trying put off the Georgia trial, which is technically slated for August, though few anticipate it will be held before the 2024 election. All bets are off, of course, if Trump wins.
In the absence of a criminal conviction — at least for now — attorneys for Moss and Freeman have argued that a large civil defamation award against Giuliani might serve as an alternative form of justice. In addition to the $48 million in compensatory damages, their lead lawyer in the courtroom, Michael Gottlieb, has asked the jury for unspecified additional amounts for “incalculable” emotional distress and punitive damages to act as a deterrent to “any other powerful figure” who was thinking about “assassinating the name and character of ordinary people.”
Some of the most powerful moments in the courtroom this week came when Freeman and Moss testified about the lasting harms they have experienced as a result of being held up for extended public vilification. Moss said she had gone to see a therapist, although that was not the sort thing she thought she would ever do and was diagnosed with depression. She said she now has a recurring dream in which people with torches and pitchforks come to her home, but they’re not an unruly mob — they’re famous, powerful people. “In my dream, they could do that because of who they are,” she testified. “I’m a nobody.” Moss said her fear of being recognized from the internet had led her to immediately change her hair, getting rid of her blonde braids. She learned that she was a stress eater, and she estimated she had put on 70 pounds.
After Moss was passed over for her promotion at work, she had to train the person hired for the position. She decided to leave the elections department and applied for a new job, working in the corporate headquarters of Chick-fil-A. The interview took place in a closed restaurant, which was filled with other people seeking employment. Her interviewer turned around his computer.
“Last question: Is this you?” the interviewer asked, Moss testified. On the screen, there was an article he had found by Googling her, calling her an election fraudster. “Is this true?”
Freeman became most emotional when she talked about her home. She testified that after she moved out on January 5, she mostly stayed in Airbnbs. She pleaded for help from a church, but the pastor never responded. Her friends were only welcoming to a point. “People were afraid to be associated with me,” Freeman said. She and Moss also stayed apart, figuring it was safer. She found out that some crazy person was found with a “death list” that included her name. When she did eventually return home, she was always looking at her new security cameras. She and her daughter were both paranoid about being recognized. Moss tried to avoid leaving the house alone or going anywhere at night. Freeman kept wearing a mask long after she stopped worrying about COVID.
Eventually, Moss quit her job. She still hasn’t found another. Freeman put her home on the market and borrowed against her equity to buy a new place. She said she doesn’t know the neighbors where she lives now, and she no longer goes by Lady Ruby. “I can’t introduce myself no more,” Freeman said. “I miss my old neighborhood, because I was me.”
She was sobbing, and two of the eight jurors were dabbing their eyes with tissues.
“My life is just messed up, really messed up, all because somebody just put me on blast, tweeting my name out,” Freeman said. “I’m kinda lost, y’all … But I do know that I have purpose.”
When it came time for Giuliani’s attorney, Joseph Sibley, to cross-examine Freeman, he stood up, introduced himself, said he was happy to finally meet her. Then he announced: “No questions.”
Giuliani had been assuring reporters he planned to testify in his own defense, saying outside the courtroom on Monday that once he spoke, it would be “definitively clear that what I said was true.” After Freeman left the stand on Wednesday, his commitment sounded like it was starting to waver. “The truth will come out,” he said in a brief press conference outside the courthouse. “I didn’t say when.” So it didn’t come as much of a surprise on Thursday morning when Sibley indicated to the judge that the defense would not be calling Giuliani or any witnesses at all.
Giuliani was in his customary spot in the courtroom, sitting at the defense table, jabbing at his iPad. (From where I was sitting, it seemed like he spent a good part of the trial reading the online edition of the New York Post.) But as the jury filed into the courtroom, at the end of a morning break, Giuliani stood up and walked out of the courtroom, seemingly to visit the bathroom. He’s a 79-year-old man who was once treated for prostate cancer, but even so, the timing didn’t seem coincidental. He was not present when Sibley stood up and said, “Your honor, the defense rests.”
Let the record reflect that when it came time to defend himself, Rudy Giuliani was likely visiting the john.
