A Georgia election worker told jurors that she feared for her life after she received a barrage of racist and threatening messages fuelled by Rudy Giuliani’s false claims that she and her mother had rigged the 2020 election results in the state.
Wandrea Shaye Moss told jurors she seldom leaves her home, suffers from panic attacks and battles nightmares brought on by a barrage of threatening and racist messages.
She sobbed as she told the court that her life was turned upside down by the accusations, though they were quickly debunked by state officials, and recounted changing her appearance to try to hide as Mr Giuliani and other allies of former president Donald Trump used surveillance footage to accuse her and her mother, Ruby Freeman, of committing voter fraud.
The 39-year-old said: “I was afraid for my life. I literally felt like someone going to come and attempt to hang me and there’s nothing that anyone will be able to do about it.”
Her emotional evidence came on the second day of a defamation trial that Mr Giuliani’s lawyer has said could financially ruin the former New York City mayor.
Ms Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, are seeking tens of millions of dollars in damages.
Mr Giuliani is preparing to defend himself against criminal charges in a separate case in Georgia over his efforts to keep Mr Trump in power.
He has pleaded not guilty in that criminal case, which accuses him and others of scheming to overturn Donald Trumps’ 2020 election loss in the state of Georgia. Mr Giuliani has denied any wrongdoing.
The judge overseeing the defamation case has already found Mr Giuliani liable and he has also acknowledged in court that he made public comments falsely claiming Ms Freeman and Ms Moss committed fraud while counting ballots.
The only issue remaining in the trial is the amount of damages Giuliani will have to pay the women.
The women’s lawyers estimated that reputational damages could reach 47 million dollars (£37 million), and suggested emotional and punitive damages on top of that could be “tens of millions”.
Ms Moss, who also gave evidence before the US House Committee that investigated the Capitol attack, recounted being brought into her director’s office after Mr Giuliani falsely claimed during a Georgia legislative hearing in December 2020 that workers at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta had committed election fraud.
Ms Moss did not have any idea that lies about them were being spread and thought her director wanted to recognise her for her election work or give her a job she had been promised, she told jurors.
Instead the mood in the room was sombre, and soon she learned the real reason for the meeting.
“I am shown these videos, these lies, everything that had been going on that I had no clue about,” Ms Moss said.
Ms Moss said she went home that night, scared and confused, and could only watch as the angry messages poured in.
Shown a video of Mr Giuliani speaking on his online show about a false suitcase ballot conspiracy, she said: “How can someone with so much power go public and talk about things that he obviously has no clue about? It just obvious that it’s lies.”
Earlier, the judge overseeing the case scolded Mr Giuliani for comments he made outside the courthouse in which he insisted his false claims about the women were true.
US District Judge Beryl Howell warned Mr Giuliani’s lawyer that the remarks his client made to reporters about Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea Shaye Moss when leaving the courthouse a day earlier amounted to “defamatory statements about them yet again”.
The judge appeared incredulous, asking Mr Giuliani’s lawyer about the contradiction of his opening statements calling Ms Freeman and Ms Moss “good people” but then the former mayor repeating unfounded allegations of voter fraud.
“How are we supposed to reconcile that?” she asked the lawyer.
Mr Giuliani’s lawyer, Joseph Sibley, conceded her point and told the judge he discussed the comments with his client but added: “I can’t control everything he does.”
He also argued that the former mayor’s age and health concerns make long days in court challenging.
Outside the courthouse on Monday, however, Mr Giuliani told reporters: “When I testify, the whole story will be definitively clear that what I said was true, and that, whatever happened to them, which is unfortunate about other people overreacting, everything I said about them is true.”
Mr Giuliani added that Ms Moss and Ms Freeman were “engaged in changing votes”.
When a reporter pushed back, saying there was no proof of that, Mr Giuliani replied: “You’re damn right there is. … Stay tuned.”
