About halfway down the main hallway in the federal courthouse in Washington DC are the names of every judge who has sat on the bench since the early 1800s. Printed in gold lettering, the names include Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, Antonin Scalia and Ketanji Brown Jackson, all of whom have gone on to the highest levels of public service.
But this week, four floors above that hallway, in courtroom 26A, two little-known public servants mourned the moment they lost their own names.
In harrowing detail, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea ArShaye Moss testified about how Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump falsely accused them of election fraud and ruined their lives shortly after the 2020 election as part of a scheme to contest and overturn the results. They told eight Washington DC jurors how they received a flood of racist messages and death threats. And how they’ve fled their homes outside Atlanta, Georgia, isolated themselves from their community and started protecting their identities. “I don’t have a name no more,” Freeman said on Wednesday. “Sometimes I don’t know who I am.”
As millions of Americans have heard by now, Giuliani, the former New York mayor, repeatedly lied about the two women, who are Black. He claimed that they wheeled suitcases of illegal ballots out from under tables after counting had concluded at State Farm Arena, that they were passing around USB drives and that they created a fake water main break.
The case was one of several significant efforts to hold Giuliani, Trump and other allies accountable for the lies they spread about the 2020 election – an election Trump continues to insist that he won.
The jury awarded Moss and Freeman $148.1m in cumulative damages.
***
The Giuliani case was about more than defamation. It was about power.
At issue in the case wasn’t really the fact that Giuliani lied, but whom he lied about. It was a case about the way powerful people can use their influence to destroy the reputations of the average person.
Moss spoke about this during her testimony on Tuesday when she described a nightmare she continues to have. In it, she opens her front door, she said, and finds powerful people with nooses ready to kill her.
“They could do that because of who they are,” Moss said. “I’m a nobody.”
Giuliani showed little emotion or remorse as lawyers for Freeman and Moss played horrific messages they received, including voicemails filled with racial slurs and letters sent to their homes with graphic death threats.
In the first moments of the case, Von DuBose, one of the attorneys for Freeman and Moss, asked the jurors to consider the power of a name. “What’s in a name? Power, purpose, pride,” he said. “Your name is the most important thing you know.”
He went on to say that the case was about how the names of Freeman and Moss had been transformed by Giuliani’s defamatory lies. Unspoken, too, were those of two men who have built their careers around their names: Giuliani and Trump. Two men who have continued to benefit as Moss and Freeman suffered.
Though they never intended it, Moss and Freeman have become symbols of the human cost of election denialism because of that imbalance of power.
They have largely stayed out of the public eye since 2020, but their presence in a Washington DC courtroom served as a stand-in for the droves of election workers who have faced lies and harassment from people who believe the election was stolen. Many of them have left the profession.
That sentiment was driven home in a gut-wrenching moment when Moss testified about the initial weeks in December 2020 when she went back to work, even while receiving harassment, to prepared for Georgia’s January 2021 runoff election. “I literally felt like someone was going to come and attempt to hang me and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
“Amidst all of this my goal was to get ready for the next election,” she said. “It’s hurtful … That’s the way people feel when I’m breaking my back to make sure their vote counts.”
***
Usually in high-profile cases, it is the wealthy, famous person who is surrounded by a phalanx of lawyers in the courtroom. But in 26A this week, Giuliani sat alone at the defense table, flicking through his tablet, with a single lawyer, Joseph Sibley.
Sibley did his best, with scattershot arguments to the jury to try to persuade them that Giuliani was not responsible for serious harm against the plaintiffs. He pointed to other actors, such as the far-right platform Gateway Pundit, that he said were really to blame for Freeman and Moss’s suffering because of how they disseminated the lies and videos. It would not really cost tens of millions of dollars to repair the reputation of the two women, he argued at another point.
At the end, he made a simpler appeal: judge Giuliani by his good reputation.
“Rudy Giuliani is a good man. I know that some of you may not think that. He hasn’t exactly helped himself with some of the things that have happened in the last few days,” he said. “The idea of him being a racist, or him encouraging racist activity, that’s really a low blow. That’s not who he is.”
At the plaintiffs’ table, about 10ft away, it was Moss and Freeman who sat quietly surrounded by a dozen attorneys. It was the first time the two women had come face to face with the man who has tormented them for years.
“After everything they went through, they stood up and they said no more. They opened themselves up to you and the public, and unlike some other people, they testified here under oath,” Michael Gottlieb, one of their attorneys, said in closing arguments, needling Giuliani’s last-minute decision not to testify.
He urged the jurors to “send a message” with their damages award.
“Send it to Mr Giuliani,” the lawyer said in his closing argument. “Send it to any other powerful figure with a platform and an audience who is considering whether they will take the chance to seek profit and fame by assassinating the moral character of ordinary people.”
***
The verdict came, and it sent a message. But it didn’t yet bring closure.
It’s not clear when Moss and Freeman can expect to see a cent of the money they’ve been awarded. Giuliani is widely reported to have financial troubles and he is likely to use an appeal and every other legal maneuver to try to delay paying. And it’s not clear whether the case will even stop Giuliani from defaming them again.
“I don’t regret a damn thing,” he said outside the federal courthouse on Friday.
Giuliani had been far from repentant throughout the week. And since August, when Judge Beryl Howell entered a default judgment against Giuliani for defamation per se, intentional infliction of emotional distress and civil conspiracy, Giuliani has made at least 20 defamatory statements against Freeman and Moss, their attorneys said this week.
The dynamic underscores the limits of defamation law to police misinformation. While it can force people to pay for their lies, it cannot force them to stop lying or persuade people not to believe the lies.
RonNell Andersen Jones, a first amendment scholar at the University of Utah, said observers were concerned about instances in which defamers brush aside damages. In cases involving large media outlets, she said, it may simply be seen as the cost of doing business. And in others, like that of Giuliani, people may simply “be judgment-proof, bankrupt, or otherwise unwilling or unable to pay”, she said.
“In both situations, we’re testing the outer boundaries of libel law’s ability to remedy the harm done by falsehoods and to deter defamers from telling future lies. We are also, more fundamentally, testing the rule of law,” she added.
“If the incentive to lie to audiences eager to receive those lies is stronger than the power of any court proceeding, and if defamers have decided that they simply will not participate in cases brought against them and will avoid paying damages when they are issued, this raises far deeper concerns.”
Even with the money, it won’t be able to undo the damage that the two women suffered to their reputations. Moss loved her job as a Fulton county election official and thought her interim position as the permanent absentee ballot supervisor would be made permanent.
Instead, she was moved to a back office role under the impression she would never touch a ballot again.
“I want people to understand this: money will never solve all of my problems. I can never move back to the house I called home. I will always have to be careful about where I go, and who I choose to share my name with,” Freeman said outside the federal courthouse in Washington DC after the verdict on Friday.
“I miss my home, I miss my neighbors, and I miss my name.”
