They say that every trial tells a story, but some trials tell more than one. Rudy Giuliani’s civil defamation trial in Washington, D.C., is a public spectacle because of the notoriety of its defendant, a once-respected man who has descended into grotesque caricature. He has been happy to perform, executing barrel rolls as he pilots his plane into the ground. Attorneys for the plaintiffs, election workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, made their final arguments to the jury on Thursday morning, asking for at least $48 million in compensation for the harm to their reputations from lies Giuliani spread about them in order to assist his client, Donald Trump, in his efforts to contest the result of the vote in 2020. But the trial is not just about Giuliani, or his guilt, which was predetermined by earlier court rulings, with only the size of the damages left to be determined. Much of the testimony this week tracing the anatomy of a very modern smear has instead concerned a pair of everyday women. Only fittingly, this version of the story begins with a broken toilet.

More precisely, it all started with a leaky urinal in the State Farm Arena in Atlanta, the big venue where the Hawks play. At around 6 a.m. on Election Day 2020, water started to drip from the ceiling of a room there that was being temporarily used to tabulate absentee ballots — it was coming from the men’s room upstairs. According to a press release that went out later that morning, the room was briefly evacuated while repairs were made and the area was cleaned. “No ballots were damaged,” the release said, “nor was any equipment affected.” Workers quickly returned to the task of tabulating votes in Fulton County, which ended up going overwhelmingly for Joe Biden, helping him to win Georgia by a margin of about 12,000 votes.

Moss, a county employee, was overseeing the tabulation of absentee ballots in the room. Now 39, she had been working for the elections department since graduating from college, starting part time in the mail room before being hired to a full-time position that involved processing absentee ballots. She testified on Tuesday that she loved her job because it involved helping disabled people and the elderly, who greatly appreciated her service. This was Atlanta, after all, where a lot of older Black folks didn’t take their right to vote for granted. In 2020, Moss was given an interim supervisor position, which paid her the same salary as her old job, around $35,000 a year, but came with a lot more responsibility. The raging pandemic had led to a surge in absentee voting. “I was excited to be in charge,” Moss testified. She was expecting that if all went well with the absentee count in 2020, the department might make her supervisor title permanent.

Everyone had forgotten all about the plumbing leak by the time polls closed. The arena was crowded with government workers, reporters, and election observers from both parties. In case all those eyes weren’t enough, Moss’s room was under constant surveillance by security cameras. Across America, citizens were nervously watching the returns, which at first showed Trump with large leads that would shrink over the next few hours and days as the Democratic-leaning absentees were counted. (The day after the election, with 95 percent of the vote in, Trump still led Biden by 37,000 votes in Georgia.) For the employees processing the absentee ballots at State Farm Arena, though, Election Night wasn’t dramatic. It was a repetitive clerical routine: One group cut open envelopes and handed them to the extractors, who put the ballots in trays for a third group, the scanners.

As was typical, the county had hired temporary workers to help out during the rush of election season. One of the temps was Moss’s mother, Ruby Freeman. She was a native of rural southern Georgia, “a Christian,” she would later tell the jury, who had attended segregated schools until sixth grade. Freeman had grown up with casual racism, like most Southerners of her generation, and dealt with it by keeping her distance. (“If they have the audacity to call you the N-word,” she said she learned as a child, “just don’t associate with them.”) For the prior two decades, Freeman had lived in a pretty white clapboard house on a piney road in exurban Cobb County. She had started to work as a street vendor in the 1980s, selling authentic Atlanta Braves apparel outside Fulton County Stadium, where the team used to play. Over time, Freeman testified, the clothing business evolved into a “traveling boutique” called LaRuby’s Unique Treasures.

“I am Lady Ruby,” Freeman said as she introduced herself to the jury on Wednesday. She wore a bright-red turtleneck, a black-and-white patterned blazer, and a pair of dangly earrings. Her hair was dyed blond. “Lady Rudy was special. It meant ‘classy,’ ‘unique.’”

At the plaintiff’s table, Freeman’s daughter intermittently waved a multicolored fan, like one of those characters in the courtroom gallery in an old movie. The table was littered with wrappers from her mother’s favorite ginger-mint candies, to which Lady Ruby attributes healing properties. “I noticed her honor was coughing yesterday,” Freeman said, referring to Judge Beryl Howell. “I wanted to give her one.” The mints, like the plumbing incident, would later prove significant.

Freeman’s name was also her brand. On Election Day, she wore a purple shirt that said “Lady Ruby” on it, and carried a LaRuby purse. She and her daughter worked at the arena from early in the morning until late in the night. The absentee-vote counting was supposed to end for the night at about 10 p.m., and around that time, everyone started to pack up, sealing the opened but uncounted ballots in boxes and stowing them under tables. Many workers went home, as did the party election monitors and reporters. The head of the county elections department, Ralph Jones, had shown up to oversee the end of the day. Frank Braun, an investigator with the Georgia secretary of state’s office, later reviewed surveillance tapes from the arena and testified that there was a discernible moment, at 10:58 p.m., when you could see the mood in the room change. “Ralph gets the phone call,” Braun said, then his shoulders slump, as if to say “Oh my goodness.” The higher-ups had ordered the workers to keep going into the morning. The whole election now hinged on the outcome in a handful of states, including Georgia.

“As you’re watching this,” Braun said, “you’re expecting them to revolt. But they didn’t.” Freeman, Moss, and others retrieved the boxes of opened but uncounted ballots from under the tables, broke the seals, and got back to work. The previous division of labor went out the window, and everyone concentrated on scanning. Braun testified that you could see someone give Ruby Freeman a “quick tutorial” on how to use the scanning machine, which could be ornery. “If you watch the video,” Braun said, “it appears to me that she gets frustrated.” If a ballot was crumpled or food-stained, or the glass on the scanner got smudged, the machine would jam. Whenever that happened, Freeman would have to run the whole batch of........

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