Giuliani found in contempt again in $148 million defamation case

A federal judge on Friday found Rudy Giuliani in civil contempt of court for continuing to make false claims about two Georgia election workers after being ordered to pay them $148 million in a defamation case, hinting Giuliani could face jail time if he does not stop.

U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell of Washington, D.C., on Friday blasted the former New York mayor and Trump attorney for continuing to falsely claim that former Fulton County election workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss manipulated the 2020 vote count in Atlanta. A jury found in December 2023 that he had defamed the women, and he agreed in a consent order with the court in May to stop repeating the claims.

“Mr. Giuliani, you’re the most famous person in this courtroom right now. You’ve got a bigger audience, you’ve got a bigger public following than anyone in this courtroom, you’ve got a respected public service history,” Howell told him during a three-hour court hearing. “I really hoped (you) would stop saying such fabricated lies, at least publicly.”

Howell gave Giuliani a chance to avoid punishment and purge her contempt finding if, by Jan. 20, he “acknowledges and affirms” that his allegations against the women are contradicted by the sworn evidence in his trial and Georgia’s state police investigation, and reaches an agreement to pay their attorney fees for bringing the contempt action.

If he does not do so within 10 days, Howell said, he will be fined $200 per day. And she warned that given his history of not paying the judgment or attorney fees for refusing to cooperate in the litigation, she would consider the workers’ demand for a $20,000-per-day fine – or even jail time.

“Confinement or incarceration is obviously the most severe penalty that can be imposed for civil contempt,” Howell acknowledged. “But I am very concerned based on statements he made during this hearing that Mr. Giuliani may not be persuaded to stop making statements that violate the consent judgment in this case without even more severe sanction.”

Howell’s comments come four days after U.S. District Judge Lewis J. Liman in Manhattan found separately that Giuliani had not complied with requests for evidence and other information about assets to satisfy the judgment against him, including about his Palm Beach, Florida, condominium, a Mercedes-Benz once owned by actress Lauren Bacall and a $5 million Upper East Side apartment in New York.

Liman said he would withhold judgment on other possible sanctions, but that he would make inferences about gaps in evidence from Giuliani during a proceeding scheduled for Jan. 16 to decide if he can keep his Florida home as his residence or must turn it over because it is deemed a vacation home. The election workers said he also has failed to surrender luxury belongings, including watches and sports memorabilia, such as a Joe DiMaggio jersey.

Giuliani attacked Howell before the hearing on social media and in a statement outside the courthouse afterward as biased and pathologically anti-Trump.

“The hearing is a hypocritical waste of time and a disgusting example of Biden lawfare,” Giuliani wrote on X.

Giuliani attorney Eden P. Quainton argued that his client’s statements were his true opinions that were protected by the First Amendment and related to his ongoing appeal of the defamation ruling.

But Howell ruled that defamation is not protected speech. Giuliani’s statements, she said, were made to the public, not to a court, noting that Giuliani and his lawyers agreed last year not to state or imply that the women engaged in wrongdoing in the 2020 election, or to repeat any of the 34 statements deemed defamatory.

Freeman and Moss in November sought the contempt hearing, saying that Giuliani continued to attack them in two episodes of his nightly podcast, on Nov. 12 and Nov. 14. In court Friday, they cited examples from two other days: Nov. 19 and Nov. 21.

“They never let me show the tapes that show them quadruple counting the … ballots” at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta after the 2020 election, Giuliani said, according to the filing from the women’s lawyers and attached exhibits. He alleged the tapes showed the workers “passing these little … hard drives that we maintain were used to fix the machines, right, and they say it was candy.”

Freeman attorney Michael J. Gottlieb argued that the statements repeated “the exact same lies for which Mr. Giuliani has already been held liable, and which he agreed to be bound by court order to stop repeating.”

Trump’s Giuliani-led legal team had used misleading security footage of the election workers to accuse them of stuffing vote-counting machines with “suitcases” of fake ballots and a thumb drive of electronic data.

But none of the accusations against Freeman and Moss, who is Freeman’s daughter, were true, a Georgia secretary of state investigation found. The supposed suitcases were regular ballot boxes, and the purported USB drive was a ginger mint. Howell based the damages award on Giuliani’s own admissions and his refusal to turn over evidence in the case, as well as his net worth and the size of his radio, YouTube and other online audiences. Giuliani declined to contest the facts of the case and did not testify in his own defense, despite publicly saying that he would.

In a written statement after Friday’s hearing, Giuliani spokesman Ted Goodman said: “The public should know that Mayor Rudy Giuliani never had the opportunity to defend himself on the facts in the defamation case. This is an important point that many Americans still don’t realize due to biased coverage and a campaign to silence Mayor Giuliani. This contempt ruling is designed to prevent Mayor Giuliani from exercising his constitutional rights.”