Rudy Giuliani’s precipitous plummet, from America’s Mayor to America’s Moron, is nearly complete. He has lost virtually everything – his once exalted reputation, his once robust balance sheet, his purported credibility, in all likelihood his law license – as befits a buffoon who somehow thought it would be fruitful to marinate in MAGA madness.
And now, thanks to a civil court jury in Washington, D.C., he will be rightly harassed for money for the rest of his pitiable life.
In an ideal world, Ruby Freeman and Shay Moss – the Georgia election workers whom he so disgracefully defamed – would strip him of every last cent and compel him to raise the rest of their riches by working as a greeter at Four Seasons Landscaping. If only, right?
It won’t go that way, of course, because even though the jury awarded those ladies nearly $150 million – a massive measure of justice for Rudy’s toxic lies and the resultant ruination of their lives – the guy is basically broke, to the point where some of his own lawyers are suing him to get paid. Maybe he can dodge payments to Freeman and Moss by declaring bankruptcy, but that may need to be hashed out by yet another of the many courts that Rudy is condemned to visit in his final years.
What a pathetic downfall, but so well deserved. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, as you may know, Rudy goose-stepped into the lives of Freeman and Moss (mother and daughter) after they dared to do the grunt work of making our democracy function. They were tasked with helping to count ballots in greater Atlanta, but because the vote tally heavily favored Joe Biden, naturally Rudy (and his demented mentor) got it into their heads that the ladies had rigged the count. Plus, they’re Black women – and, as we all know from MAGA lore, “bad things” supposedly happen in places with lots of Black people.
The lies were relentless: Freeman was supposedly “a professional vote scammer” who “stuffed the ballot boxes” for Biden; she and her daughter were supposedly “responsible for awarding at least 18,000 ballots” to Biden; she and her daughter, according to Rudy’s dark fantasies, were “quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine,” with the intention of using USB ports to “infiltrate the crooked Dominion voting machines.”
That purported USB port turned out to be…a ginger mint. Moss was captured on video giving her mother…a ginger mint.
The two ladies – who, thanks to Rudy, were targeted by an avalanche of graphic racist material and phone calls – subsequently decided to sue Rudy for defamation. Understandably so, especially since Freeman (on the recommendation of the FBI) had been forced to flee her home. And it quickly became clear, in the early stages of the civil court proceedings, that Rudy was in very deep trouble. Five months ago, he confessed in writing “for the purpose of deciding the case on the legal issues,” that his statements about the ladies had been “defamatory per se.”
The jury’s sole task was to determine how much Rudy should pay. Rudy made their job even easier by declaring days ago that he’d testify in his own defense, only to cowardly renege at the last minute.
But what was especially stunning, even for this MAGA sewer dweller, is that despite being dragged into court, and despite having already confessed to defamation, he waltzed out of court last Tuesday and defamed the ladies all over again, babbling to an ABC News reporter that “everything I said about them is true,” that they “were engaged in changing votes.” This guy deserves to be penniless. He’s not fit to live with the unhoused under a highway.
You may be tempted to shrug off yesterday’s verdict, thinking that it’s just about Rudy. But in truth he and Trump are scorpions in the same bottle. They’re co-defendants in the Georgia criminal racketeering case, and whereas Rudy defamed the ladies publicly, Trump defamed them umpteen times in his “perfect” phone calls to Georgia election officials. And Jack Smith clearly intends to reference the ladies in his coup case against Trump in federal criminal court; he recently wrote to Judge Tanya Chutkan: “Long after the charged conduct, (Trump) continued to falsely attack (them), despite being on notice that his claims about them in 2020 were false and had subjected them to vile, racist, and violent threats and harassment.”
The travails suffered by Freeman and Moss are visceral evidence of how fascist lies hurt real people. Juries respond to stuff like that. Indeed, the civil judgement against Rudy should remind us that accountability is still possible in MAGA-addled America, and that demagogues should tread carefully, lest they be shamed for the rest of their lives and chased for every last cent.