Former New York mayor and Donald Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani apparently took offense when The Daily Show mused about the "end of Rudy Giuliani".
On Wednesday, The Daily Show's interim host, Kal Penn, ran a segment detailing a lawsuit brought against Mr Giuliani by two election workers in Georgia. Wandrea “Shaye” Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, have accused Mr Giuliani of defaming them when he pushed conspiracy theories claiming the women had committed voter fraud to help Joe Biden's election in 2020.
A judge ultimately ruled that Mr Giuliani did defame the women. A federal jury is deliberating to determine how much he will have to pay to the women.
The clip includes Mr Giuliani's lawyer, Joseph Sibley saying that a jury decision to grant the women what they're asking — tens of millions — "will be the end of Mr. Giuliani".
Penn took that line and ran with it, saying "don't threaten the jury with a good time" before imagining a slapstick scenario that involved both Mr Giuliani and Mr Trump slipping in urine.
Mr Giuliani did not find the clip amusing.
"Yikes. This show hasn't been funny in years. I didn't even realise it was still running. I don't even recognise the host other than to say he looks like slob," Mr Giuliani said in a post on X/Twitter.
Mr Giuliani then seemed to suggest that Penn was openly advocating for his death.
"...and what are you hoping for when you say, 'the end of Rudy Giuliani?'" he wrote. "Sick people, and definitely not funny!"
“The lies in this case became a sustained, deliberate, viral campaign, the purpose of which was to overturn an election and have these statements rocket around the world millions and millions of times,” Michael Gottlieb, an attorney for the women, said during her closing arguments on Friday.
The women defamed by Mr Giuliani claimed that they received harassment and death threats from Trump loyalists in the wake of the voter fraud claims made by the former New York mayor.
Mr Sibley said the ruling was the "civil equivalent to the death penalty" and said that Mr Giuliani was not responsible for the ensuing harassment the women faced.
“Just because these things happened – and they did happen – doesn’t make my client responsible for them,” he said on Thursday.
That defense did not protect Alex Jones, who was also found guilty in a defamation lawsuit after he claimed the parents of the children killed in the Sandy Hook mass shooting were crisis actors faking their grief. The families were harassed and threatened for years as a result, and Mr Jones was ordered to pay nearly $1.49bn in damages.
