It only took a few moments for Rudy Giuliani‘s attorney to make a scathing attack in his opening statements against Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, likening their lawsuit against Giuliani to the “death penalty.”
The trial, which kicked off Monday in Washington, will determine the damages Giuliani will have to pay the former Georgia election workers after he conceded to making “defamatory statements” against both women, falsely alleging they committed fraud and tampered with votes during the 2020 presidential election.
Both women sued him in 2021 for up to $43 million because Giuliani’s inflammatory remarks incited an onslaught of heinous death threats and racial harassment against them.
It reportedly took around two hours for an eight-person jury to be seated, but once the jury selection process wrapped up, opening statements began.
“There’s no question these claimants were harmed. They didn’t deserve what happened to them,” Giuliani’s attorney, Joseph A. Sibley IV, said in his opening statement. “But what happened to them happened because of a controversy involving a lot of people, not just Rudy Giuliani. You’ll see a lot of evidence of harm. But not a lot of evidence Mr. Giuliani was the cause.”
CBS News reporter Scott MacFarlane live-tweeted those statements in which he recounted how Sibley also said that Freeman and Moss’ attorneys are seeking the “civil equivalent of the death penalty” in damages but requested that the jury select a payout that is “fair and proportional” to his client’s actions.
As a basis for that request, he stated that Giuliani never made any threatening statements against both women outside of the false election fraud claims. Sibley also tried to equate this case to the $15 million defamation case Johnny Depp brought against Amber Heard until the judge told him only to highlight his client’s case.
Freeman’s and Moss’ attorneys maintained that Freeman…
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