Courts

Rudy Giuliani Runs Into Judicial Buzzsaw. Again.

That one's gonna leave a mark.

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rudy giuliani

(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Rudy Giuliani’s got a whole pile of legal problems. There’s the criminal indictment in Georgia, defamation suits by Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, a computer hacking suit filed by Hunter Biden, and even a collections action filed by his former lawyer — and former friend — Robert Costello.

But his most pressing legal issue is the defamation suit filed by Atlanta poll workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, who faced years of harassment and threats after the former president’s lawyer falsely accused them of counting thousands of fraudulent ballots for Joe Biden in 2020. After years of ducking discovery, and netting himself a default judgment, Giuliani appears to have adopted a new legal strategy: giving up.

In her August 30 order granting default to the plaintiffs, Judge Beryl Howell tried again to give America’s Mayor “a final opportunity to comply with discovery relevant to the determination of damages, both compensatory and punitive, or face imposition of additional discovery-related sanctions.” She ordered him to cough up the ownership structure and viewer metrics for his podcast, information about his personal finances, and roughly $143,000 in attorney’s fees to compensate the plaintiffs for all the time they’d spent trying to shake that information loose. 

Taking a carrot and stick approach, the court offered the possibility of a permissive, rather than mandatory, jury instruction as to whether Giuliani had deliberately concealed his net worth. But if the defendant failed to turn over the missing discovery by September 20, he’d get an even worse jury instruction.

Naturally, Rudy chose door number two.

On September 29, Freeman and Moss informed the court that “Plaintiffs received no productions or payments from either Defendant Giuliani or the Giuliani Businesses.” The plaintiffs requested not only the adverse jury instructions promised by the court, but also an order authorizing them to go seize his assets outside of DC immediately, before he could dissipate them.

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“Publicly available information suggests that Defendant Giuliani has the capacity to comply with the Fees Orders to pay Plaintiffs the money he currently owes,” they wrote, noting that he just put his condo in New York on the market for $6.5 million, and that the former president is hosting $100,000-a-seat fundraisers to benefit his former lawyer.

The court failed to bite on the second ask, reasoning that there’s no provision in the Federal Rules to allow for a pre-judgment “final judgment” which would allow the plaintiffs to collect before trial. And while the plaintiffs’ fears of dissipation (AHEM) may be “well founded,” Judge Howell wrote, “the damages trial on all plaintiffs’ claims against Giuliani is scheduled to occur in less than two months, after which trial final judgment will be entered promptly.”

As to the first remedy, though, the plaintiffs got exactly what they wanted. For the purposes of computing damages, the court will instruct the jury that Giuliani was “intentionally trying to hide relevant discovery” about his businesses and the viewership of his video podcast “for the purpose of shielding his assets from discovery and artificially deflating his net worth” and “artificially deflating the reach of his defamatory statements.” They’ll be told to assume that he “received substantial financial benefits from [his] defamation of Plaintiffs,” and that he continues to do so.

For his part, the defendant will be precluded from “making any argument, or introducing any evidence, stating or suggesting that he is insolvent, bankrupt, judgment proof, or otherwise unable to defend himself, comply with this Court’s orders, or satisfy an eventual judgment” or introducing evidence he failed to disclose in discovery.

And since he more or less failed to cooperate with discovery at all, that’s functionally a complete ban on defending himself at the trial, which is due to start in just eight weeks. It’s just like Alex Jones — before he got himself a billion dollar jury verdict.

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But fear not, patriots. The storied former prosecutor is taking it all in stride.

Or he’s babbling into a camera with the football game on in the background. Maybe both!

Freeman v. Herring Networks [Docket, via Court Listener]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.

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