In a hearing in front of state lawmakers in Georgia on 11 December 2020, Rudy Giuliani baselessly accused a mother-daughter pair of election workers in the state of “quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they are vials of heroin or cocaine”.
He smeared Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss as criminals whose workplaces and homes should be searched for evidence of voter fraud.
Donald Trump’s former attorney, who launched spurious lawsuits to overturn 2020 presidential election results, also appeared on podcasts and television shows to falsely claim those women wheeled a suitcase loaded with fraudulent ballots into a vote-counting centre and used a flash drive to manipulate the results to ensure Joe Biden’s victory.
Three years and one day after he introduced those bogus claims to Georgia lawmakers, Mr Giuliani sat with his attorneys for the first day of a civil trial in a federal courtroom in Washington DC, where an eight-member jury will determine how much he owes for defaming them.
The case is among the highest-profile attempts yet to hold members of Mr Trump’s circle accountable for the volatile aftermath of the 2020 election. His attorneys fear it could be the “civil equivalent of the death penalty” for him.
If jurors impose the tens of millions of dollars in damages the women could be awarded, his attorneys told the jury that “it would be the end of Mr Giuliani.”
Mr Giuliani was already found liable for defaming those women, who faced a wave of racist threats and harassment fuelled by false claims amplified across social media and right-wing media networks.
Those threats and a pressure campaign against them are also at the centre of a sprawling criminal case in Atlanta, where Mr Giuliani is a co-defendant alongside the former president and a dozen others accused of a criminal enterprise to unlawfully overturn the state’s election results in 2020.
He also is an unnamed co-conspirator in a federal election conspiracy case that charges Mr Trump with four crimes connected to his alleged attempts to subvert the election’s outcome.
The lawsuit against Mr Giuliani initially included co-defendants including right-wing media outlet One America News, its owners and one of its star personalities. They later settled, leaving only Mr Giuliani, the former New York City mayor once hailed as “America’s mayor” and now embroiled in a growing heap of legal challenges stemming from his loyalty to the criminally indicted former president.
Von DuBose, an attorney representing the election workers, held up a ginger mint to the jurors in his opening statements on 11 December.
That’s what Ms Freeman handed her mother, “a piece of candy,” not a USB drive loaded with fraudulent votes to steal the election from Mr Trump.
Jurors will not see any video of them passing around a USB drive “because it doesn’t exist,” he said.
The only issue remaining at a four-day trial in Washington DC will determine just how much Mr Giuliani owes the defendants for their claims of defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, civil conspiracy and punitive damages.
Mr Giuliani is not only liable for the harm caused by his own actions, but also for the actions of his co-conspirators, US District Judge Beryl Howell told jurors.
Rudy Giuliani is pictured leaving federal court in Washington DC on 19 May
The judge’s default judgment in the case in August reprimanded Mr Giuliani for his failure to turn over evidence in the case and attempts to frame himself as a victim of unfair persecution.
“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 straight-forward defamation case,” the judge wrote.
“We will ask you to think about how needless, how cruel, it is for powerful figures like Mr Giuliani to target election workers and volunteers and brand them as fraudsters and criminals without evidence,” their attorney Michael Gottlieb told jurors in his opening statement.
“In the United States of America, behaviour like Rudy Giuliani’s is not the inevitable result of politics,” he said. “It is not acceptable, and it will not be tolerated.”
Shaye Moss, left, and Ruby Freeman speak onstage during the 16th annual CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute at the American Museum of Natural History in 2022
