Shame is society’s most powerful enforcement mechanism against misconduct. But what does society do about people who have made shamelessness into a commercial and political brand, who thumb their noses at punishment and treat it as a form of promotion? This question was at the center of Rudy Giuliani’s defamation trial this week, which ended today with an astronomical $148 million damage verdict. But it has been similarly at issue in all of the many legal proceedings that have arisen from the ashes of Donald Trump’s scorched-earth assault on the 2020 election. These cases have made the E. Barrett Prettyman federal courthouse on Constitution Avenue into a hub of political accountability. Like the rest of her colleagues, the judge in the Giuliani trial, Obama appointee Beryl Howell, has simultaneously been handling some of the January 6 criminal cases. She recently gave a speech warning of America’s authoritarian drift and called this a “time of testing.” At least for one week, in this one courthouse, it seemed as if the legal system was strong enough to pass the test.
Howell’s courtroom is just a short walk from Judge Tanya Chutkan’s, where Trump could go on trial next year, if the Supreme Court allows it. Though it was a civil case, and an unusual one at that, the defamation lawsuit against Giuliani concerned many of the same facts that special counsel Jack Smith cited in his indictment of Trump on charges related to January 6, and Giuliani’s trial offered a first opportunity to hear how a jury would assess the damage done by just one of their deceits. The check has now been reckoned. The jury verdict says Giuliani owes Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss — a pair of Georgia election workers whom he put at the center of conspiracy theory about a plot to stuff the ballot box — $33 million for damages to their reputations, $40 million for emotional distress, and $75 million in punitive damages as punishment for his unapologetic malice. A popular line of thinking suggests that a circus trial might only make Trump stronger. But this evidence suggests that Trump would be well advised to do whatever he can to avoid a confrontation with the truth in court.
Usually, for a reporter, the jury-selection process that starts a trial is a skippable formality. But for this case, I decided to sit through the preliminaries. Because of the nature of the civil trial, there would only be eight jurors, not the usual 12. But the group of Washington, D.C., residents was presumably representative of the potential pool for Trump’s trial. The judge interviewed 18 candidates during the voir dire process. There was an Al Jazeera America journalist who covered January 6 and told the judge she would have a hard time being fair-minded, given her “pretty strong feelings about what happened and some of the characters involved.” There was a gray-bearded guy who said he possessed “no views” on Giuliani with a tone of cool conviction, but then again, he also said he worked for the CIA. There was an earnest-looking young man who asked to be excused because he had to run a long-scheduled “Five Eyes intelligence-sharing conference” later in the week. There was a cardigan-wearing single father who said he had strong views about the fairness of the legal system, since he had recently been arrested by a SWAT team on federal drug conspiracy charges, which were later dropped. None of those people made it on the jury, though I wish a few of them would call me.
The plaintiffs in the case against Giuliani were a pair of Black women who experienced a torrent of vile and racist abuse as result of being falsely accused of electoral fraud. So the racial makeup of the jury mattered. In the end, the eight who were picked included a white former naval officer who now works for a tech start-up; a retired Black woman who said she spends her days looking after her grandson; a middle-aged white woman who said she works for the U.S. Forest Service; a young Black man who is a contractor doing cost analysis for the Defense Intelligence Agency; another contractor, this one white, who is assigned to the U.S. Postal Service; a gray-haired white woman who works as admin at a law firm; another older white woman who is an accountant for the Girl Scouts; and a Black woman who says she was on disability as result of being accidentally hit in a drive-by shooting in 2002. As a group, they were very D.C.
Their job was to quantify the incalculable. Giuliani’s guilt was decided over the summer by Judge Howell, who entered a default judgment against the former New York mayor and federal prosecutor after he repeatedly refused to comply with the normal process of civil discovery. She took the unusual step of ordering a trial solely to determine damages, assuring that Giuliani would have to go through some public pain. “How much is someone’s reputation worth?” the plaintiffs’ lead courtroom attorney Michael Gottlieb asked in his opening statement. “What about peace of mind, dignity, safety?”
Gottlieb and his team called Northwestern University professor Ashlee Humphreys, a social-media expert, to testify about the reach and cost of Giuliani’s claim that a surveillance video from an Atlanta ballot counting center, which showed Freeman and Moss working late into the night to tabulate absentee ballots, was evidence of an electoral crime. To demonstrate her method, she showed how she traced the reach of just one December 23, 2020, podcast episode, in which he narrated the actions on the video and said they resembled a “bank heist.” Through open sources, Humphreys was able to estimate that the podcast received somewhere between roughly 600,000 and 800,000 “receptive impressions” via podcast downloads, views on video platforms and related social-media posts. She repeated that exercise for other defamatory statements. From those estimates, Humphreys was able to extrapolate how much it would cost to create contradicting messages with similar reach. The attorneys used these cost estimates, in turn, to establish a basis for their compensatory damages request to the jury, which came to $24 million per plaintiff.
Giuliani’s attorney, Joseph Sibley, questioned the fuzziness of Humphreys’s estimates on cross-examination, which the plaintiffs were happy to concede. One of the many things Giuliani refused to turn over in discovery were internal engagement figures from his social-media and podcasting accounts, which meant that Humphreys was forced to rely on open sources. The judge had already ruled the jury was entitled to assume he was trying to conceal the reach of his statements, and the plaintiffs were free to suggest that Humphreys’s estimates were likely an undercount. The defense attorney also suggested that Humphreys was a partisan because she had consulted or testified in other defamation cases against Trump, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and the conservative nonprofit Project Veritas. He even went so far as to suggest to the expert that in some ways, Moss and Freeman had benefited from being defamed. He pointed out that they had both been awarded with medals by President Biden.
“We’re not thanking Mr. Giuliani for that,” Sibley said, “but sometimes these things can elevate a person.”
Giuliani did not testify in his own defense, despite indicating to reporters during the trial that he would. (In a press conference after the damages verdict on Friday, Giuliani said he feared being jailed for contempt if he said what he really believed.) In his closing argument, Sibley made a plea for sympathy. “I want you to remember this is a great man,” the attorney said of his client. He mentioned Giuliani’s service as prosecutor and of course his performance as mayor on September 11. He said Giuliani was “having trouble accepting the facts in this case” because he felt he had been vilified and then vindicated in his crusade to convince the media to examine Hunter Biden’s laptop. If he was right about that, then why not this, too?
“I’m trying to get you to understand why he’s bitter,” Sibley said. “Why he’s made some of the statements that he’s made, even during this trial.”
Sibley said he would not contest the proposition that Moss and Freeman deserved compensation for what they went through. He pointed the jurors toward some modest numbers, like the amount of money that Freeman spent on Airbnbs after having to flee her house in fear for her life, and the future earnings that Moss would have from her roughly $35,000-a-year job as a county election worker, had she not felt forced to quit because of the repercussions of being labeled a fraudster. “They’re asking you to award a catastrophic amount of damages against my client,” Sibley said. He urged the jury to instead say to Rudy: “You should have done better, but you’re not as bad as the plaintiffs are making you out to be.”
Any lingering twinge of sympathy a New Yorker might feel for the Rudy of old — who, let’s be clear, was never that great of a mayor to begin with — ought to be tempered by the realization that he plans to appeal the verdict, and presumably has had plenty time of to set things up for himself with bankruptcy lawyers and other specialists in shielding assets. “He’s O.J.,” says media lawyer and podcaster Dan Novack, alluding to the fact that after losing a wrongful-death case brought by the parents of Ron Goldman, the accused murderer moved to debtor-friendly Florida and lived well for a while. (As of 2021, Simpson reportedly had paid just $133,000 of the $50 million judgment.) At any rate, it always seemed unlikely that the balance of sympathy would favor a former millionaire, former presidential candidate, and former Time Person of the Year over a pair of women who were living their lives quietly until he blew them to pieces.
“Mr. Giuliani thought that he could get away with making Ruby and Shaye the face of election fraud because they were ordinary and expendable,” Gottlieb said in his closing. “He has no right to offer defenseless civil servants up to a virtual mob.” In addition to reputational damages, he urged the jury to add additional penalties for the emotional distress caused by Giuliani, Trump, and others involved in the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The women had testified, with moving credibility, that they still lived in fear of being killed. “It’s dangerous for them to be Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss because of the actions of Mr. Giuliani and his co-conspirators,” Gottlieb said.
Finally, Gottlieb asked for an unspecified additional amount of punitive damages. Technically, they could be unlimited, but the plaintiff’s proposed jury instructions gave a rough range, suggesting a maximum penalty of four times the compensatory damages. The punitive damages were meant to reflect the jury’s collective judgment about how much Giuliani ought to be punished for his actions, as a deterrent to others who might choose to follow his lead. Even Sibley admitted in his closing that his client hadn’t “exactly helped himself” by continuing to express defiance and denying any remorse in his statements to reporters during the trial. “He does not think Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman are good people,” Gottlieb said. “He never has, and the evidence suggests he never will.” He put a photo up on a TV screen, showing Giuliani, looking googly-eyed and deranged, at one of his press conferences outside the courthouse.
“Day after day, Mr. Giuliani reminds you of who he is,” Gottlieb said. “Believe him.”
And the jury did.
