Rudy Giuliani’s trial is over. His lawyer did not call any witnesses for the defense. The jurors deliberated for about three hours yesterday before adjourning and will resume their work today.

Beryl Howell, the US district judge, had already found him liable for defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and civil conspiracy when he publicly attacked Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two Georgia election workers, accusing them of switching votes from serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) to Joe Biden. This trial was for eight members of the jury to decide how much in damages the two workers were entitled to for the hell that they went through at the hands of SSAT’s supporters because of Giuliani’s lies.

In his closing statement, the women’s lawyer Michael Gottlieb described the harrowing experiences that the two women had undergone because of Giuliani’s vicious attacks.

Attorneys for Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss are urging the panel to award the women $24 million apiece for Giuliani’s defamation against them, which they say ignited years of threats, professional and personal consequences and devastation of their mental health. Moss and Freeman are also asking for an unspecified additional amount for emotional distress, as well as a “punitive” award to deter future misconduct.
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“He has no right to offer defenseless civil servants up to a virtual mob in order to overturn an election,” Gottlieb said during his closing argument. “The cost that has [been] imposed on Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss, on all those he has deceived, and to the public confidence in our democracy are incalculable.”

Giuliani’s lawyer Joseph Sibley has tried to play the good cop to Giuliani’s bad cop, trying to convince the jury that while what Freeman and Moss had suffered was bad, Giuliani was not really a bad guy and that the blame should be with the right wing media for amplifying his words.

In his closing statement, Sibley sought to distance Giuliani from the threats and harassment Freeman and Moss endured. Instead, he laid the blame at the far-right news outlet The Gateway Pundit which he said was the first place Freeman and Moss were identified by name and urged readers to harass them. Freeman and Moss are separately suing the outlet for defamation in a Missouri court.

“More likely than not, this is the party that sort of doxxed these women,” he said.

Sibley acknowledged Giuliani had wronged Moss and Freeman, but urged the jury to judge the former New York City based on the context of his whole career.

“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.”

I am tired of the ‘that is not who I am’ excuse trotted out when people get caught doing deplorable things. Giuliani clearly implied that the two women are drug users. They happen to be Black. Does anyone think that that was a coincidence?

But when Giuliani spoke outside the court earlier this week, he was all bravado.

“When I testify, you’ll get the whole story and it will be definitively clear what I said was true and that whatever happened to them, which was unfortunate if other people overreacted, but everything I said about them is true,” he had said on Monday. “Of course I don’t regret it, I told the truth.”

This was obviously delusional and to no one’s surprise, yesterday Giuliani decided not to take the stand at all, thus wrapping up the trial, leaving just the final summations. It would have been nice to see him cross-examined and shown to be the nasty liar that he is.

Sibley incredibly said that they were not putting Giuliani on the stand to prevent further pain to the two women.

Sibley told jurors the decision was aimed at sparing Moss and Freeman — whose emotional testimony this week he described as genuine and credible — further trauma.

“These women have been through enough,” Sibley said, calling Giuliani “irresponsible” for stoking false claims against Moss and Freeman without conducting an investigation.

Yeah, right. The real reason has to be that any halfway decent lawyer would have shredded Giuliani under cross examination.

The women’s lawyer made sure to point out how cowardly Giuliani was.

“Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, it turns out are miles and miles away from ordinary. They are heroes. After everything they went through, they stood up and they said no more,” Gottlieb said in his closing statement. “They opened themselves up to you and the public, and unlike some other people, they testified here under oath.”

The women are asking for $24 million in damages each. It is not clear how much the jury will award them and the next thing would be to try and get the money from Giuliani. You can be sure that he has spent a lot of time trying to hide his assets so that they cannot be taken from him.