Prosecutors are cracking down on former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani for allegedly defaming election workers during the 2020 presidential election.
U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell, who is overseeing the case, also condemned Giuliani for his repeated failure to comply with discovery obligations and his attempted change of course on “the eve of the jury trial.”
This comes after Ruby Freeman, a Georgia election worker, and her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss filed a lawsuit against Giuliani and numerous other parties in December 2021.
Giuliani’s trial already started on Dec. 11, where it is being decided what kind of damages the former attorney will have to pay, including compensatory and punitive damages. However, Giuliani recently said in court documents that a judge, not a jury, should decide how much money is appropriate.
“Giuliani’s position that the long-standing jury demand in this case was extinguished when he was found liable on plaintiffs’ claims by default, is wrong as a matter of law,” Howell wrote in her filing. One of Giuliani’s claims — which Howell called an attempt “to shift blame onto plaintiffs for any prejudice resulting from a potential conversion from a jury to a bench trial” — is “simply nonsense,” Howell wrote.
The judge has already found Giuliani “civilly liable on plaintiffs’ defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, civil conspiracy, and punitive damage claims” because of the former Trump attorney’s “willful discovery misconduct” and his purposeful “shirking of his discovery obligations.”
Giuliani has previously admitted that in 2020, he made “false” claims against Freeman and Moss, who were both employed at the State Farm Arena in Fulton County, Georgia, where the votes were processed.
Georgia was lost by former President Donald Trump, as was the 2020 presidential election. Giuliani attacked the two in an attempt to sabotage those results. At one point, he even made up a story that claimed the video showed them passing around USB drives “like vials of heroin or cocaine,” when in fact Freeman had given her daughter a ginger mint.
Howell previously wrote that Giuliani had “given only lip service to compliance with his discovery obligations,” and that putting on “a cloak of victimization may play well on a public stage to certain audiences,” but not in court, where it “served only to subvert the normal process of discovery in a straight-forward defamation case.”
