Rudy Giuliani backs out of testifying as defamation trial wraps up

Rudy Giuliani chickened out of testifying Thursday at his damages trial for defaming two Atlanta election workers in what is likely to careen as a catastrophic defeat for the man once known as America’s mayor.

Despite promising Giuliani would explain his actions, a defense lawyer ended the ex-New York City mayor’s case without calling him to the witness stand, asserting that he did not want to risk Giuliani making things worse for mother-and-daughter election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss.

“These women have been through enough,” Joseph Sibley said in a remarkable concession during his closing argument, according to Politico.

Giuliani’s lawyer conceded the jury should impose damages but urged them to “be reasonable,” citing his history of public service and his inspiring leadership after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

A lawyer for Moss and Freeman countered that the jury should “send a message” by holding Giuliani accountable for his vicious lies, which he inexplicably repeated as recently as this week on the courthouse steps outside the trial.

“He (had) no right to offer up defenseless civil servants up to a virtual mob in order to overturn an election,” said Freeman’s lawyer, Michael Gottlieb, according to NBC News. “He says he isn’t sorry. He’s telegraphing that he will do this again. Believe him.”

The jury is now deliberating on the $48 million damages case after days of devastating and mostly unchallenged testimony against Giuliani presented by Freeman and Moss. The panel could also award an extra four times that amount, or up to $192 million, in punitive damages, District Court Judge Beryl Howell told jurors, according to the Guardian.

The jury heard evidence in a weeklong trial to determine the amount of damages he must pay after Howell already ruled that the increasingly mercurial Giuliani was liable for defaming the women.

By all accounts, the damages trial has been an unmitigated disaster for Giuliani as Freeman and Moss delivered emotional accounts of how the campaign of lies effectively turned their lives upside down.

Giuliani and former President Donald Trump falsely claimed Freeman and Moss helped rig votes for President Joe Biden, a key part of the Big Lie campaign to help Trump overturn his loss in the 2020 election.

Even as the election workers told jurors about the ordeal that Giuliani put them through, the once-respected America’s mayor inexplicably repeated the same lies that led to the defamation suit in the first place.

The hounding of Moss and Freeman is also a big part of the sweeping Georgia state RICO election interference conspiracy case against Trump, Giuliani and more than a dozen acolytes.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has accused the campaign of smearing Moss and Freeman, serving as one pillar of a tangled plot engineered by Trump to steal the 2020 election in Georgia and other states.

In a bizarre twist, a controversial co-defendant of Giuliani and Trump in the RICO case made an unexpected appearance in the courtroom for the last day of the damages trial, according to reporters for Scripps News and The Messenger.

Harrison Floyd is accused in that case of seeking to bully Freeman into falsely saying she rigged votes for Biden as part of Trump’s bigger alleged scheme to steal the election.

Under his bail conditions, Floyd is barred from having any “contact with any co-defendant, witness, or any person specifically named in the indictment in this case,” the Hill reported.

He sat just a few feet away from Freeman and Giuliani. It’s unclear if Georgia prosecutors may ask Judge Scott McAfee to revoke Floyd’s bail or ask the judge to tighten the conditions.

Floyd, who runs a group of pro-Trump Black voters, was recently accused of violating the bail conditions by tagging witnesses in threatening social media posts but McAfee let him off the hook.

Giuliani is also facing an increasingly dire financial situation, although critics accuse him of crying poor to avoid meeting his obligations.

He is being sued for unpaid fees by a former lawyer and for alleged sex harassment by an ex-aide who says he forced her to perform oral sex while he talked on the phone with Trump because “it made him feel like Bill Clinton.”

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