A pair of former Georgia election workers filed a federal lawsuit on Monday against Rudy Giuliani, alleging the former Donald Trump attorney has continued to defame them regarding their work on the 2020 election, even after a federal court concluded last week Mr Giuliani owes the pair $148m for his past remarks on the subject.
The suit, filed in Washington DC, federal court, accuses Mr Giuliani of “repeating over and over the same lies that [the] Plaintiffs engaged in election fraud during their service as election workers during the 2020 presidential election.”
“I’m not going to comment on any potential upcoming legal matters, but I will say this—the Rudy Giuliani you see today is the same man who took down the Mafia, cleaned up New York City, lifted hundreds of thousands of people out of poverty, and comforted the nation—and world—following the terrorist attacks of September 11th,” Ted Goodman, an advisor to Mr Giuliani, told The Independent via email.
Throughout and after his federal defamation trial, the key Donald Trump ally continued to falsely suggest mother and daughter Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss were part of an election conspiracy, according to the suit.
The suit notes that same day as the verdict, Mr Giuliani told reporters in Washington, “I have no doubt that my comments were made and they were supportable and are supportable today. I just did not have an opportunity to present the evidence that we offered.”
Hours after the decision, the former mayor of New York went on Newsmax and suggested he had further evidence to support his claims about the workers, claiming at trial he hadn’t been able to show “all the videos at the time” which captured “what happened at the arena” where Donald Trump and his allies have baselessly alleged election crimes took place.
The following day, Mr Giuliani said the defamation suit was a “sham of a trial” on a podcast with former Trump adviser Steve Bannon.
The legal action seeks an injunction to stop Mr Giuliani from continuing to make claims about the election workers, conduct the election workers argue has amounted so far to a “campaign of targeted defamation and harassment.”
The suit also alleges that the former election workers’ attorneys reached out to Mr Giuliani after the defamation trial to ask that he refrain from making the claims at issue, but that he refused.
After the 2020 election Ms Freeman and Ms Moss, became the target of numerous Republican officials, who allege they helped tip the state on behalf of Joe Biden.
Georgia’s State Election Board cleared the allegations against the women and dismissed bogus claims of election fraud in the state.
On the stand in their defamation trial, the women described facing a torrent of violent threats and racist online abuse when they became the subject of allegations from Mr Giuliani and others in the Trump camp.
“It feels like I’m in a dark place and I’m surrounded by lies and conspiracies, like I’m surrounded by a swamp of loneliness and sadness and negativity,” Ms Freeman told jurors last week. “I still feel like I’m in that cycle of eat, sleep, cry, look online.”
Alex Woodward contributed reporting to this story.
