Judge enters default judgment against Giuliani in defamation lawsuit

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WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge entered a default judgment Wednesday against Rudy Giuliani in a defamation lawsuit brought by two Georgia election workers who say they were falsely accused of participating in fraud during the 2020 presidential election.

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U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell also ordered Giuliani to pay more than $130,000 in lawyers’ fees and other costs for shirking his duty to turn over information requested by election workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea’ ArShaye Moss, as part of their lawsuit.

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Their lawsuit from December 2021 accused Giuliani, one of Donald Trump’s lawyers and a confidant of the former Republican president, of defaming them by falsely stating that they had engaged in fraud while counting ballots at State Farm Arena in Atlanta.

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“Donning a cloak of victimization may play well on a public stage to certain audiences, but in a court of law this performance has served only to subvert the normal process of discovery in a straight-forward defamation case, with the concomitant necessity of repeated court intervention,” Howell wrote.

Ted Goodman, a political adviser to Giuliani, a former New York City mayor, said in a statement that the judge’s ruling “is a prime example of the weaponization of our justice system, where the process is the punishment. This decision should be reversed, as Mayor Giuliani is wrongly accused of not preserving electronic evidence that was seized and held by the FBI.”

Last month, Giuliani conceded that he made public comments falsely claiming the election workers committed ballot fraud during the 2020 election, but he contended that the statements were protected by the First Amendment.