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MANHATTAN (CN) — Rudy Giuliani on Friday tried to fight off a bid from two Georgia election workers to hold him in contempt of court after they accused the former New York City mayor of trying to squirm his way out of paying them a $148 million defamation award.
The two election workers, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea Moss, say Giuliani skirted court orders by hiding his assets and refusing to participate in discovery to avoid paying the hefty penalty. They initially sued Giuliani in 2021 after he spread baseless claims that they’d helped to steal the 2020 U.S. presidential election from then-candidate Donald Trump.
Their lawyers’ discovery requests, Giuliani testified Friday, were “abusive and overbroad.”
It was a return to old stomping grounds for Giuliani, who served as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York from 1983 to 1989. But on Friday, it was Giuliani on the witness stand in that courthouse, where he tried to buck claims from Freeman and Moss that he engaged in a “consistent pattern of willful defiance” of the court’s orders to surrender his assets, which include his watch collection, cash and a signed Joe DiMaggio shirt, among other sports memorabilia.
“I can’t find it. I just can’t find it,” Giuliani said of a signed photograph of New York Yankees legend Reggie Jackson he is purported to own.
Giuliani said he was “blessed” to have owned an “extraordinary” amount of Yankee memorabilia in his lifetime, but after numerous moves and divorces, it’s been impossible to keep track of it all.
“I get confused about what I have and what I don’t have,” he testified Friday.
In response to the discovery issues, Giuliani has claimed that he relied on his previous counsel, Kenneth Caruso and David Labkowski, to comply with the court’s orders. But those lawyers withdrew from the case in November, stating in a motion that Giuliani “will not participate” in the case’s discovery process and refused to give up his cell phone and pertinent records.
When faced with that statement on Friday, Giuliani said he didn’t recall ever hearing that he was uncooperative, despite Caruso explicitly stating that he had emailed the withdrawal motion to Giuliani.
“Is it your testimony today that Mr. Caruso was lying when he said that?” U.S. District Judge Lewis Liman, a Donald Trump appointee, asked from the bench. “Are you saying that it is untrue that he sent a copy of the motion to you via email?”
Giuliani replied that he wasn’t calling his ex-lawyer a liar, he just did not remember hearing this before.
As Freeman and Moss’ attorney Meryl Governski continued to pepper Giuliani with written statements regarding the discovery in this case, his answers remained largely the same: that he never intentionally disobeyed the court by withholding relevant information about his assets.
The 80-year-old had requested to appear virtually at Friday’s hearing, citing medical problems with his left knee and breathing problems that stem from his time at the World Trade Center site on Sept. 11, 2001. But he decided to show up in person, limping into the courtroom on Friday, after Liman suggested it would free up his strategy to fight the contempt motion.
Friday’s hearing was a lengthy one that, at times, drew the ire of the judge. He chided attorneys on both sides for eliciting unnecessarily long testimony when confirming the accuracy of documents already in evidence.
At one point, Liman nearly denied Giuliani’s request for a restroom break, despite the matter requiring “urgency” according to Giuliani’s lawyer. But the judge eventually agreed to the brief recess.
Despite roughly six hours of testimony, the contempt hearing didn’t wrap up on Friday. The parties will return to court on Monday, except for Giuliani, who got permission from the judge to appear virtually from his Palm Beach residence.
Later this month, this case will hold a trial to determine whether Giuliani’s Palm Beach condo and collection of New York Yankees World Series rings will have to be surrendered to Freeman and Moss with his other assets.
Giuliani claims that his condo is his primary residence and should be left out of the judgement via a homestead exemption. And the rings, he claims, are no longer his — he says he gifted them to his son Andrew Giuliani in 2018.
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