Things haven’t been going well for Rudy Giuliani. Last year, a jury awarded Georgia election workers Shaye Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, nearly $150 million in their defamation suit against him. It’s a sum that Giuliani hasn’t coughed up since the judgment, citing a lack of cash flow. Accordingly, a New York federal judge handed down an order on Tuesday forcing him to turn over millions of dollars’ worth of assets to Freeman and Moss, including his New York City condominium.
Since helping orchestrate former President Donald Trump’s failed attempt at election theft, Giuliani has lost his law license in New York and Washington, D.C.; been charged criminally in Arizona and Georgia; and faced a slew of other defamation lawsuits for the lies he told after the 2020 election. It’s a turn of events that feels downright karmic given the scale of the damage he’s caused, part of a chain of consequences and repercussions that have hounded him over the last four years. And as Trump and his allies prepare to challenge a loss next month, Giuliani’s downfall should serve as a reminder that their actions can have a steep cost.
Given his meteoric plummet from grace, it can be easy to forget that Giuliani was living a lavish lifestyle between his time as mayor of New York and serving as Trump’s personal lawyer. He was earning millions of dollars each year in fees from consulting and spending it almost as quickly. The number of legal troubles he’s faced and bills he’s left unpaid sent him to bankruptcy court last year — which promptly dismissed his filing, allowing Moss and Freeman to resume asking for what he owed them.
In the opinion from U.S. District Judge Lewis Liman, Giuliani is ordered to turn over two pages worth of valuables within the next week. At the top of the list are the co-op shares and lease to his condo on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, which was listed on the realty website StreetEasy for $5.175 million within the last month. The list also includes 26 luxury watches, a 1980 Mercedes-Benz once owned by actress Lauren Bacall, and the contents of several checking accounts (minus any amounts the court deemed exempt).
Liman noted that Giuliani had tried to hold onto some of those items because they’re “unique,” like Bacall’s Benz and “a watch gifted in response to the 9/11 attacks by the President of France.” If it’s auctioned off to pay his debts, the former mayor had argued to the court, it would make it much more difficult to reclaim them if he wins his appeal that’s currently before the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. But, as Liman wrote, since Giuliani didn’t post a bond for a similar value for those items, as he was invited to do, he is now out of luck:
The Court also does not doubt that certain of the items may have sentimental value to Defendant. But that does not entitle Defendant to continued enjoyment of the assets to the detriment of the Plaintiffs to whom he owes approximately $150 million. It is, after all, the underlying policy of these New York statutes that “no man should be permitted to live at the same time in luxury and in debt.”
The trinkets Morgan and Shae will be receiving are valuable, but the most interesting thing they now possess is intangible: roughly $2 million in debt Giuliani is still owed from Trump’s 2020 campaign and the Republican National Committee. Incredibly, Giuliani requested that the debt not be turned over until after Election Day, since the plaintiffs could use it to spread confusing lies and stir up a media frenzy. “The profound irony manifest in Defendant’s alleged concern is not lost on the Court,” Liman wrote. “By his own admission, Defendant defamed Plaintiffs by perpetuating lies about them.”
As I said, it’s extremely gratifying to see Giuliani forced to reckon with his attempt to subvert democracy. It’s also a reminder that it has been the civil courts that have been able to provide the harshest punishments since then. The criminal cases against Giuliani, Trump and others have all either been purposefully stalled by Trump’s defense or were filed recently enough that pre-trial preparations are still underway.
In contrast, the sheer volume of defamatory statements that were made in the run-up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol have made Giuliani and his ilk into rich targets. He is the subject of suits from Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic for his lies about electronic votes being changed from Trump. Fox News was forced to pay more than $700 million to settle their own defamation suit from Dominion for airing those lies. Those sums should give the Republicans that have been laying the groundwork for a new election theft narrative pause.
Concerningly, Trump-supporting billionaire Elon Musk repeated the Dominion lie in recent days without any seeming worry about drawing costly litigation. It’s for that reason that there is a limit to how much schadenfreude Giuliani's pending impoverishment can bring me. Being poor in a system like America’s is not a moral failing, despite what the rich and powerful have continuously claimed. But the same reasoning that will wrest these funds from Giuliani will much more easily strip a working-class person of their few assets.
And yet there is still a righteous satisfaction in seeing someone like Giuliani brought low, given the depth of his crimes. As Moss and Freeman testified to the House Jan. 6 Committee in 2022, his false claims that they had handled suitcases filled with ballots lead to death threats against them, forcing Freeman to flee her home. He did so despite knowing Trump had lost the election and has shown no remorse for the way he uprooted their lives. It is easy then to see the justice in Giuliani’s former home being turned over to Freeman after driving her from hers.
