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Left: Former Mayor of New York City Rudy Giuliani at the funeral service for NYPD police officer Wilbert Mora at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Feb. 2, 2022, in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. (File Photo by: zz/NDZ/STAR MAX/IPx 2022 2/2/22) Right: Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, a former Georgia election worker, is comforted by her mother Ruby Freeman, right, as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol continues to reveal its findings of a year-long investigation, at the Capitol in Washington, June 21, 2022. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File).
The Georgia women who were targeted by Rudy Giuliani’s postelection smear campaign — and who a jury determined are owed nearly $150 million because of it — say that the former New York mayor shouldn’t be allowed to pause his bankruptcy claim in order to appeal the defamation case against him.
Giuliani owes election workers Wandrea “Shaye” Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman $148 million in defamation damages, a federal jury in Washington, D.C., determined in December. That massive award stems from Giuliani’s vicious smear campaign against the women, whom he falsely accused of manipulating votes away from Donald Trump and in favor of President Joe Biden during the 2020 presidential election. His lawyer called it the “civil equivalent of a death penalty,” and Giuliani promptly filed for bankruptcy following the damages verdict.
That bankruptcy filing put an automatic stay on the collection of that award. However, Giuliani sought an exception from that stay to pursue legal efforts to modify the judgment and possibly request a new trial.
Freeman and Moss say that the request should be denied. In an opposition filed Thursday, lawyers for the women recapped Giuliani’s lack of participation in the defamation lawsuit, ultimately resulting in a default judgment from U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell.
“The record from the Freeman Litigation is overwhelmingly clear: Mr. Giuliani had every opportunity to defend himself and chose not to participate,” the women’s opposition says. “Thus, it is the height of irony that the first substantive relief sought by Mr. Giuliani in his chapter 11 case — to be heard on an expedited basis no less — is a motion to lift the automatic stay so that he can pursue an appeal in the Freeman Litigation.”
The motion accuses Giuliani of “looking to have his cake and eat it too: he wants to appeal the Freeman Litigation, not post a bond, and use the automatic stay to bar Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss from enforcing their judgment.”
Attorney Rachel Strickland argues that the request from Giuliani — a one-time federal prosecutor in New York — is just his latest attempt to abuse the court system.
“As a matter of law, there is no basis for granting the relief Mr. Giuliani seeks,” the filing says. “Mr. Giuliani cannot simultaneously use the automatic stay as a shield to hold off creditors and as a sword to gut their legal rights. If Mr. Giuliani truly wanted to appeal the Freeman Litigation, all he needed to do was not file for chapter 11 protection.”
The motion itself, Strickland argues, “calls the good faith of [Giuliani’s] chapter 11 filing into question.”
The women’s filing notes the reality that Giuliani has “extremely limited resources” to pay the defamation judgment, and therefore “case efficiency is critical.” The former mayor’s request, however, would simply “incur substantial legal fees in order to pursue meritless appeals of non dischargeable claims.”
Strickland notes that the most Giuliani could hope for with an exception to the stay would be to “return the Freeman Litigation back to a posture in which Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss simply hold unliquidated, rather than liquidated, claims,” reminding the bankruptcy judge that Giuliani was already found to have defamed the women, something he also admitted to in a signed filing in federal court.
“In addition to seeing the distributable value in Mr. Giuliani’s estate devoured by legal fees, granting the Stay Relief Motion would ensure that little to no progress is made in this chapter 11 case for months (if not years) as Mr. Giuliani pursues his appeals,” the filing notes.
In their filing, Freeman and Moss say that the motion is just more of the same from Giuliani.
“The Stay Relief Motion is a flawed, impermissible litigation tactic from an actor with a history of engaging the judicial system in bad faith,” the filing says.
Strickland said the stakes of even this one motion carry potentially huge stakes that could affect other bankruptcy matters.
“Mr. Giuliani’s one-sided motion to lift the stay would upend the design of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and subvert the Bankruptcy Code’s purposes in favor of his own abusive litigation strategy,” the filing says.
