‘Fail on the merits’: Judge upholds Giuliani’s $148M defamation judgment for targeted election workers – By Brandi Buchman (Law and Crime) / Apri 15, 2024
A federal judge in Washington, D.C., has ruled that a $148 million judgment ordered against Rudy Giuliani after he defamed election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss will be upheld.
U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell issued the 48-page memorandum opinion on Monday, writing that the former New York City mayor and Donald Trump‘s co-defendant in the sprawling racketeering case in Georgia offered “threadbare” and unsupported legal arguments in his attempt to unwind the staggering judgment. Howell has excoriated Giuliani in the past, writing in December when she ordered him to pay Freeman and Moss promptly that he had been an “unwilling and uncooperative” litigant. Giuliani called the judgment the equivalent to the “civil death penalty” after he loss the case last year. He promptly filed for bankruptcy and is in the throes of those proceedings now.
“Giuliani’s renewed motion urging this Court to reverse its prior findings and rulings to override the jury’s considered verdict on the basis of five threadbare arguments falls well short of persuading that ‘the evidence and all reasonable inferences that can be drawn therefrom are so one-sided that reasonable men and women could not have reached a verdict in [plaintiff’s] favor,’” Howell wrote. “The jury’s verdict awarding plaintiff’s compensatory and punitive damages for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress caused by Giuliani and his co-conspirators, as reflected in final judgment, is the amount of $145,969,000 plus post-judgment interest [citation omitted].”
