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Ruby Freeman And Shaye Moss Win Right To Collect Giuliani's Unpaid Legal Bills From Trump Campaign

Hourly or quantum meruit?

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rudy giuliani

(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Rudy Giuliani is the gift that keeps on giving for Donald Trump. After steering him into two separate impeachments and failing to overturn the 2020 election, America’s erstwhile Mayor has just saddled the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee with a collections action by former Atlanta poll workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss.

Karma’s a bitch, man.

In 2020, Giuliani smeared Freeman and Moss, falsely claiming that they had stolen the election from Trump in Georgia by tabulating fraudulent ballots. Trump himself named Freeman, whom he described as a “professional vote scammer,” 18 times in his infamous call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

In 2021, the pair sued for defamation, and the following year Judge Beryl Howell granted them a default judgment, thanks to Rudy’s complete failure to comply with his discovery obligations. A jury awarded the plaintiffs $148 million, after which Rudy stumbled into and out of bankruptcy in a shambolic attempt to evade collections. That case is now on appeal to the DC Circuit, but Giuliani is in no financial position to post a supersedeas bond. (Who would underwrite an 80-year-old disbarred lawyer who is functionally insolvent?)

On August 5, Freeman and Moss filed a collection action in the Southern District of New York, along with a contemporaneous seizure claim in Florida with respect to Giuliani’s Palm Beach condo. In a deposition, Giuliani admitted that he’d never been paid “about two million dollars” in legal fees by the Trump campaign and the RNC for work performed in 2020 and 2021. This jibes with a passage from the special counsel’s latest immunity filing in the election interference case:

 [Herschmann]  repeatedly gave the defendant his honest assessment that [Giuliani] could not mount successful legal challenges to the election. For instance, when the defendant told [Herschmann] that he was going to put [Giuliani] in charge of the Campaign’s legal efforts but pay him only if he succeeded, [Herschmann] told the defendant he would never have to pay [Giuliani] anything; in response, the defendant laughed and said, “we’ll see.”

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Up until now, Herschmann has been correct. But since Freeman and Moss own Rudy’s debts, they moved the court for an order allowing them to collect on the unpaid legal bills.

Giuliani countered that the court should stay enforcement until after the election, lest his creditors “use this assignment for an improper, political (or, at least, collateral) purpose, creating the confusing, and inaccurate, appearance that Defendant is now somehow suing candidate Trump, thereby generating an accompanying, and unnecessary, media frenzy.” He also made a very funny series of claims as to why Freeman and Moss should be barred from seizing his irreplaceable “memorabilia,” including a 1980 Mercedes alleged to have belonged to the actress Lauren Bacall.

Judge Liman was deeply unimpressed with Giuliani’s suggestion that forcing him to face the repercussions of his lies about the 2020 election would amount to election interference in 2024.

“The profound irony manifest in Defendant’s alleged concern is not lost on the Court,” the judge wrote, adding that “the risk—if any—that the public would be misled could come only from Defendant himself or from those who wish the Plaintiffs not to pursue their claim. But that is not a risk that would permit Defendant to retain his claim, nor does it suffice to prevent Plaintiffs from pursuing a claim for compensation that justly belongs, and is owed, to them.”

And Rudy’s not keeping the Merc either.

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The Court also does not doubt that certain of the items may have sentimental value to Defendant. But that does not entitle Defendant to continued enjoyment of the assets to the detriment of the Plaintiffs to whom he owes approximately $150 million. It is, after all, the underlying policy of these New York statutes that “no man should be permitted to live at the same time in luxury and in debt.”

Ah, well. They can take his 18 watches and his unpaid legal bills, but they’ll never take his dign—

HAHAHAHA, nevermind.

Freeman v. Giuliani [Docket via Court Listener]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.

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