A jury ordered Rudy Giuliani to pay a total of $148 million to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss in the defamation case they brought against him for falsely accusing them of stealing the 2020 election in Georgia.
Shame is society’s most powerful enforcement mechanism against misconduct. But what does society do about people who have made shamelessness into a commercial and political brand, who thumb their noses at punishment and treat it as a form of promotion? This question was at the center of Rudy Giuliani’s defamation trial this week, which ended today with an astronomical $148 million damage verdict. But it has been similarly at issue in all of the many legal proceedings that have arisen from the ashes of Donald Trump’s scorched-earth assault on the 2020 election. These cases have made the E. Barrett Prettyman federal courthouse on Constitution Avenue into a hub of political accountability. Like the rest of her colleagues, the judge in the Giuliani trial, Obama appointee Beryl Howell, has simultaneously been handling some of the January 6 criminal cases. She recently gave a speech warning of America’s authoritarian drift and called this a “time of testing.” At least for one week, in this one courthouse, it seemed as if the legal system was strong enough to pass the test.
Howell’s courtroom is just a short walk from Judge Tanya Chutkan’s, where Trump could go on trial next year, if the Supreme Court allows it. Though it was a civil case, and an unusual one at that, the defamation lawsuit against Giuliani concerned many of the same facts that special counsel Jack Smith cited in his indictment of Trump on charges related to January 6, and Giuliani’s trial offered a first opportunity to hear how a jury would assess the damage done by just one of their deceits. The check has now been reckoned. The jury verdict says Giuliani owes Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss — a pair of Georgia election workers whom he put at the center of conspiracy theory about a plot to stuff the ballot box — $33 million for damages to their reputations, $40 million for emotional distress, and $75 million in punitive damages as punishment for his unapologetic malice. A popular line of thinking suggests that a circus trial might only make Trump stronger. But this evidence suggests that Trump would be well advised to do whatever he can to avoid a confrontation with the truth in court.
Usually, for a reporter, the jury-selection process that starts a trial is a skippable formality. But for this case, I decided to sit through the preliminaries. Because of the nature of the civil trial, there would only be eight jurors, not the usual 12. But the group of Washington, D.C., residents was presumably representative of the potential pool for Trump’s trial. The judge interviewed 18 candidates during the voir dire process. There was an Al Jazeera America journalist who covered January 6 and told the judge she would have a hard time being fair-minded, given her “pretty strong feelings about what happened and some of the characters involved.” There was a gray-bearded guy who said he possessed “no views” on Giuliani with a tone of cool conviction, but then again, he also said he worked for the CIA. There was an earnest-looking young man who asked to be excused because he had to run a long-scheduled “Five Eyes intelligence-sharing conference” later in the week. There was a cardigan-wearing single father who said he had strong views about the fairness of the legal system, since he had recently been arrested by a SWAT team on federal drug conspiracy charges, which were later dropped. None of those people made it on the jury, though I wish a few of them would call me.
The plaintiffs in the case against Giuliani were a pair of Black women who experienced a torrent of vile and racist abuse as result of being falsely accused of electoral fraud. So the racial makeup of the jury mattered.
