Judge Beryl Howell Welcomes Rudy To The ‘Find Out’ Phase With Defamation Default Judgment

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(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Rudy Giuliani is unlikely to get capital punishment in the Fulton County, Georgia RICO case. Although, considering his courtroom performance of late, it can’t be entirely ruled out. He did, however, manage to get himself “death penalty sanctions” in the defamation suit filed by election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss for his horrendously destructive lies about their work tabulating the vote in Atlanta. googletag.cmd.push( function() { // Display ad. googletag.display( "div-id-for-top-300x250" ); });

In 2021, Freeman and Moss filed their claim in federal court in DC in 2021, accusing the former president’s lawyer and the One America News Network of spreading harmful lies about them. OAN settled six months later, leaving Giuliani to flail alone as the sole defendant.

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And flail he did!

Giuliani spent an entire year refusing to comply with discovery, even as he assured the court over and over again that of course he understood his discovery obligations, as he’s been practicing law for five decades. He appeared to blame his non-compliance on the FBI’s seizure of his electronic devices in April of 2022. The devices were returned four months later, but Rudy insisted that they’d been “wiped.” This would appear to strain credulity, but he assured the court that all was well, because the discovery vendor TrustPoint had preserved “all the data” collected by the government.

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Unfortunately Rudy was so deep in hock to TrustPoint that he couldn’t get to that data. Eventually, as he was facing his second round of sanctions in this case, Trump’s Save America PAC fronted $341,000 to get him squared up with TrustPoint. But even that infusion of cash doesn’t appear to have helped him much.

In a last ditch effort to evade discovery, this July Giuliani made a bizarre stipulation that the allegedly defamatory statements were indeed false. And yet he reserved his “ability to seek setoff, offset or settlement credit, or his argument that his statements are constitutionally protected statements or opinions or any applicable statute of limitations, or that Giuliani’s statements, in fact, caused Plaintiffs any damages.”

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Asked by the court to clarify what exactly he meant by this, he filed an equally perplexing “superseding nolo contendre.”

This appears to have been the final straw for Judge Beryl Howell. Today she published a blistering opinion imposing a default judgment on the defendant.

Describing Rudy’s stipulations as having “more holes than Swiss cheese,” she accused him of seeking to game the courts just as he tried to game the electoral system.

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The reservations in Giuliani’s stipulations make clear his goal to bypass the discovery process and a merits trial—at which his defenses may be fully scrutinized and tested in our judicial system’s time-honored adversarial process—and to delay such a fair reckoning by taking his chances on appeal, based on the abbreviated record he forced on plaintiffs. Yet, just as taking shortcuts to win an election carries risks—even potential criminal liability—bypassing the discovery process carries serious sanctions, no matter what reservations a noncompliant party may try artificially to preserve for appeal.

Judge Howell summed up Giuliani’s entire production, aside from 193 documents provided by TrustPoint as “a single page of communications, blobs of indecipherable data, a sliver of the financial documents required to be produced,” plus the aforementioned stipulations.

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His preservation practices also left something to be desired:

Giuliani’s summary of his preservation efforts amounted to turning off auto-delete at some time “in late 2020 or early 2021” on his unenumerated and unspecified “email, messaging, communication, or other document storage platforms” and refraining from manually deleting “any electronic documents or dispose[] of any paper files.”

The judge further accused Giuliani of “donning a cloak of victimization” and speculated that he simply made a calculated decision not to comply with discovery lest he be forced to produce evidence which would further incriminate him in the many pending January 6 investigations.

And so the court entered a default finding of liability on the plaintiffs’ defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, civil conspiracy, and even punitive damage claims. Worse still, Judge Howell threatens to impose even more sanctions by imposing adverse jury instructions and making him personally liable for the debts of his businesses if he doesn’t disclose information about his finances and pay roughly $143,000 of the plaintiffs’ attorneys fees.

It’s an ignominious end for America’s erstwhile Mayor. On the other hand, he didn’t have to a handcuffed perp walk today, so perhaps he ought to thank his lucky stars.

Freeman v. Herring Networks [Docket, via Court Listener]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.

Topics

Defamation, Rudy Giuliani