On December 3, 2020, one month after Americans voted for president and nearly two weeks after Joe Biden was certified as the winner in Georgia, Donald Trump’s campaign lawyers announced they had proof that the election had been stolen. “WATCH,” the official @TeamTrump account posted on Twitter, over a series of screenshots of surveillance footage from the State Farm Arena in Atlanta, which had served as a temporary vote tabulation center. The campaign claimed that the images showed election workers clearing the room of witnesses, and then pulling “suitcases filled with ballots” from under a table. Testifying before the Georgia state legislature that day, a lawyer for Trump’s campaign played a 90-second video, spliced together from many hours of surveillance footage, and drew attention to a handful of alleged culprits, including a “lady in purple,” who “had the name Ruby across her shirt.” Rudy Giuliani, the leader of the Trump legal team, repeated the claims of thievery on social media. “SMOKING GUN FROM GEORGIA,” he posted on the afternoon of December 3. He later called it “the Zapruder film” of the election.
Within hours, the conservative website Gateway Pundit had identified the “lady in purple” as a Georgia grandmother named Ruby Freeman, who had worked on the vote-counting at the arena as a temporary government employee. That evening, Freeman’s phone started blowing up and she learned that Giuliani and his colleagues had placed her at the center of a vast — and, needless to say, completely imaginary — conspiracy to stuff the ballot box. Freeman’s formerly quiet life would be “hijacked in an instant,” her attorney, Von DuBose, said on Monday, in his opening argument in a civil defamation trial in Washington. At the defense table, Giuliani — the former prosecutor, New York mayor, and 9/11 hero — scrolled on an iPad, averting his gaze from the victim of his lies.
Donald Trump has now been indicted on four occasions for his actions in and out of office, but somehow has managed to avoid any real accountability. On Monday, Jack Smith, the special prosecutor who is pursuing charges related to Trump’s instigating role on January 6 — the case best positioned to go to trial in March — filed an unusual appeal with the Supreme Court, calling for an emergency review of the ex-president’s sweeping claims of criminal immunity, which could allow the Republican front-runner to run out the clock until the next election. Trump’s lesser minions, by contrast, lack the same powers of impunity.
Giulani, who led the campaign’s post-election legal strategy — if you can call it legal, or strategy — currently faces an indictment in Georgia and disbarment as a lawyer. Freeman’s civil case presents a third avenue of accountability, threatening his financial ruin. The plan by Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss — a former supervisor at the Fulton County elections department — is to ask for as much as $43 million in compensatory damages, and the eight-person jury could potentially add many millions more in punitive damages on top of that.
Defamation lawsuits can often serve as a sort of side door to justice. In recent years, sex-crime victims have used defamation claims to expose Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Sandy Hook parents have won more than $1 billion in damages from Alex Jones. And such lawsuits have proven to be particularly effective means for meting out punishment to those who parroted Trump’s false claims that he won the 2020 election. Though the legal standard for proving defamation of a public figure is high — plaintiffs must generally show that the speaker knowingly lied or showed “reckless disregard” for the truth — the fanciful and often-malicious conspiracies advanced by Trump and his supporters soared way over the bar. Earlier this year, Fox News agreed to pay $787 million to settle claims brought by a voting machine company Dominion, which Trump’s supporters had accused of being in on the scam. Dominion’s lawsuits against other media organizations and individuals, including Giuliani, are still pending, as are many similar cases.
Ruby Freeman’s case is unusual in that the facts and Giuliani’s legal culpability are not in dispute by any of the parties, at least inside the courtroom. Freeman and Moss brought the case against Giuliani and the conservative One America News Network in 2021. The network reached a settlement, but Giuliani adopted a defiant stance, refusing to comply with numerous orders to turn over electronic records to the plaintiffs in the normal process of discovery. His attorney claimed he had lost access to the data after federal investigators seized his personal devices, which Judge Beryl Howell found unconvincing, considering the data was mostly backed up on the cloud. Earlier this year, she found that Giuliani’s “willful shirking of his discovery obligations” was so egregious that it merited a default judgment in favor of Freeman and Moss. She ordered a trial simply to determine how much Giuliani will have to pay in damages.
“The value of our reputations is not determined by our income bracket,” another of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, Michael Gottlieb, said in the opening statement. He described how his clients, a pair of working-class Black women, had been forced to give up their jobs, homes, and their anonymity after being branded as criminals by Trump, “the most powerful amplifier on Earth.” Freeman and Moss sat next to each other, facing the racially mixed jury, quietly passing back-and-forth tubes of hand moisturizer and tissues. The lawyers played video and audio clips in which Giuliani called them “serial criminals,” compared their actions to a “bank heist,” and suggested the video had caught them handing each other USB thumb drives like they were “vials of heroin or cocaine.” The nefarious object, the plaintiffs’ lawyers said, was actually a piece of ginger candy.
The lawyers played an audio tape of Trump’s notorious call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which the president singled out Freeman as a “professional vote-scammer and hustler” and said his supporters were wondering why she hadn’t yet been thrown in jail.
“You know what was trending on the internet?” Trump asked. “Where’s Ruby?”
According to her lawyers, Freeman and her family were repeatedly harassed by Trump supporters and she went into hiding right before January 6, when a mob of election-deniers descended on her home. She, her daughter, and her grandson (who used a phone number that used to belong to his mom) were barraged with abusive messages and phone calls. In the most searing moment of the trial’s opening, a series of voicemail messages were played for the jury.
“You fucking cunt bitch …”
“You’re going to jail, Ruby …”
“You’re wanted for treason …”
“Turn yourself in now. You are a traitor of the United States of America …”
Some messages used racial slurs; some threatened to hang Freeman from a tree.
In Giuliani’s defense, the Texas attorney Joseph Sibley said little of substance. “My client did something wrong,” he admitted at the outset. “Her honor has already decided that.” Giuliani and his lawyers have made little secret of their strategy, which is to quickly get to an appeal, where they will almost certainly argue that Howell, a Barack Obama appointee, was biased. (Her exchanges with Sibley were often dismissive, and sometimes acidic.) But whatever other Trump supporters might have said or done, Sibley claimed, his client had “never promoted violence against these women.” He pleaded for the jury to be merciful, saying that a huge verdict would be “the civil equivalent of the death penalty. It will be the end of Mr. Giuliani.”
In the hallway outside the courtroom, Freeman had no comment on the first day’s proceedings, but she did smile and raise a satisfied fist. After the proceedings adjourned for the day, Giuliani ambled down to a lectern outside the courthouse to address reporters, and directly contradicted what his lawyer had told the jury about his being in the wrong. “Like Russian collusion, like being accused of being a Russian pawn at the first debate,” Giuliani said, “I was proven to be telling the truth and they were proven to be liars. Once again that will happen. When I testify we will get the whole story and it will be definitively clear that what I said was true. And that whatever happened to them … It’s unfortunate if other people overreacted, but everything I said about them is true.”
A reporter asked Giuliani if he regretted what he had said.
“Of course I don’t regret it,” he replied. “I told the truth. They were engaged in changing votes.”
“Unfortunately, that’s not surprising,” DuBose, Freeman’s attorney said a few minutes later, when told of Giuliani’s statement. He declined to comment further, saying that his clients would prefer to wait to tell their side of the story on the witness stand. “I don’t know if there’s anything that will make them whole again,” DuBose said, “but they are looking forward to their day in court.”
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