Court Battles

Former Georgia election workers sue Giuliani again to ‘permanently bar’ defamatory remarks

Former Mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani arrives at the federal courthouse in Washington, Monday, Dec. 11, 2023. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Two former Georgia election workers are suing Rudy Giuliani just days after they won a previous defamation lawsuit against him.

Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss are asking a federal judge in Washington, D.C., to “permanently bar” Giuliani from making additional defamatory statements about them, according to the complaint filed Monday. They are aiming to prevent the former New York City mayor from “persisting in his defamatory campaign” against them.

“Defendant Giuliani has engaged in, and is engaging in, a continuing course of repetitive false speech and harassment — specifically, repeating over and over the same lies that Plaintiffs engaged in election fraud during their service as election workers during the 2020 presidential election,” the complaint reads.

Giuliani was ordered Friday to pay Freeman and Moss $148 million for making false claims that they committed fraud in the 2020 presidential election. The pair of workers had said in that first lawsuit that they received violent and racist threats as a result of Giuliani’s remarks following the 2020 election.

Attorneys for the two former election workers pointed to recent comments made by Giuliani during the four-day trial and after the verdict was released as reasons for the lawsuit. Giuliani last week said his testimony will “definitively clear that what I said was true, and that, whatever happened to them — which is unfortunate about other people overreacting — everything I said about them is true,” according to the complaint.

The plaintiffs also included comments he made after the jury released their verdict Friday, when he claimed in an interview with NewsMax that he had video evidence that his allegations of election fraud against the two workers were true.

“Defendant Giuliani’s statements, coupled with his refusal to agree to refrain from continuing to make such statements, make clear that he intends to persist in his campaign of targeted defamation and harassment,” the complaint says.

“It must stop. In these unique circumstances, the proper remedy is a targeted injunction barring Defendant Giuliani from continuing to repeat the very falsehoods about Plaintiffs that have already been found and held, conclusively, to be defamatory,” the complaint continues.

The parties on Monday agreed to lower the jury’s verdict by about $2 million in connection with a previous settlement Freeman and Moss reached with One America News Network and other outlets. The final judgment would be about $146 million.

Ted Goodman, political advisor to Giuliani, declined to comment on the lawsuit when reached for comment by The Hill.

“I’m not going to comment on any potential upcoming legal matters, but I will say this—the Rudy Giuliani you see today is the same man who took down the Mafia, cleaned up New York City, lifted hundreds of thousands of people out of poverty, and comforted the nation—and world—following the terrorist attacks of September 11th,” he said in a statement.

Zach Schonfeld contributed.

Updated at 9:45 pm.

Tags 2020 election giuliani defamation Rudy Giuliani

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