Wednesday morning former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani discovered he would be held liable for the attorney’s fees incurred by Ruby Freeman and Wanda “Shaye” Moss in their defamation lawsuit against Donald Trump’s main attorney during the 2020 Presidential Election in Georgia. Freeman and Moss filed suit against Giuliani for disparaging comments he made about them and the subsequent death threats they received from Trump’s fanbase.
“The bottom line is that Giuliani has refused to comply with his discovery obligations and thwarted plaintiffs Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ArShaye Moss’s procedural rights to obtain any meaningful discovery in this case,” U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell wrote in a lengthy opinion.
“Just as taking shortcuts to win an election carries risks — even potential criminal liability — bypassing the discovery process carries serious sanctions, no matter what reservations a noncompliant party may try artificially to preserve for appeal,” she added.
In July, Giuliani admitted he made false statements about Freeman and Moss. In 2020, Giuliani claimed the Fulton County election workers were “passing around USB ports like they were vials of heroin or cocaine.” Actually, they were passing a ginger mint, as described in the Jan. 6 committee report.
Freeman and Moss responded to the ruling in a prepared statement:
“Rudy Giuliani helped unleash a wave of hatred and threats we never could have imagined. It cost us our sense of security and our freedom to go about our lives. Nothing can restore all we lost, but today’s ruling is yet another neutral finding that has confirmed what we have known all along: that there was never any truth to any of the accusations about us and that we did nothing wrong.”
“We were smeared for purely political reasons, and the people responsible can and should be held accountable. Throughout all of this, we have kept the faith, secure in the knowledge that faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen. But faith without works is dead. That is why we did not lie down and go away in 2020, 2021, 2022, or 2023, but instead stood up and are still working to see justice done. The fight to rebuild our reputations and to repair the damage to our lives is not over. But today we’re one step closer, and for that we are grateful.”
Giuliani will be arraigned in Fulton County Superior Court on Sept. 6 along with eighteen of his co-defendants.