(CMR) Former Trump campaign attorney Rudy Giuliani has been ordered to pay $148 million to two former Georgia election workers he spread lies about following the 2020 election.
According to an NPR report, the ruling was made at the end of a week-long federal civil trial in Washington D.C., where a jury heard from the workers, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman, about how 2020 election conspiracies spread by Giuliani and former President Donald Trump turned their lives upside down.
“I was afraid for my life. I literally felt that someone would attempt to hang me and there was nothing anyone could do about it,” Moss said during her testimony on Tuesday.
Jurors heard numerous violent and racist voicemails the women received after Giuliani used his massive platform as a campaign attorney for Trump to spread lies about their actions as election workers in Georgia, NRP reported.
In the time after voting ended in 2020, Giuliani shared video from an absentee ballot counting facility in Fulton County, which he falsely claimed showed the two women cheating and scanning ballots multiple times to benefit Joe Biden.
A hand-count audit in Georgia found votes to have been tallied correctly in the 2020 election, and a years-long investigation by the Georgia secretary of state's office found the accusations against Moss and Freeman to be “false and unsubstantiated.”
In August, district Judge Beryl Howell found Giuliani liable for defamation due to his lack of cooperation in the case, and Giuliani conceded as part of the proceedings that his statements about Moss and Freeman were false.
So the trial this week was only held to determine the damages Moss and Freeman were owed.
Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor and two-term New York City mayor, faces more than a dozen charges in the racketeering investigation brought by the Fulton County district attorney.
Throughout the week-long civil trial, attorneys for Moss and Freeman enumerated the wide reach of election lies and the many ways those lies ruined the lives of the two women. An expert witness specializing in marketing and social media estimated that the relevant falsehoods reached tens of millions of people and that a strategic communications campaign to repair the women's reputations could cost as much as $47.4 million.
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