Rudy G.’s punitive damages verdict offers expensive lessons

I’ve previously written about the Rudy Giuliani defamation lawsuit and applicable lessons. The jury’s total verdict against Rudy G. was $148,000,000, including $75,000,00 in punitive damages—a whopper for sure. This is the type of verdict none of you will likely ever see, yet his road to $75 million illuminates numerous lessons for us.

Background

As you likely know, Rudy G.—then a lawyer for former President Donald Trump—very publicly asserted that two election workers in Fulton County, Georgia (one an employee and the other a volunteer), “stuffed the ballot box” with uncast votes for then-candidate Joe Biden. He said they were guilty of a crime and claimed the number of “ballots” so cast swung Georgia’s electoral votes to Biden. The two election workers—a mother and a daughter—claimed his statement was false.

The two sued Rudy G. for defamation based on his statements about them. He later filed a stipulation with the court—a binding admission for purposes of a trial—that basically stated, “I said these things, and they were defamatory as a matter of law.”

The stipulation was read to the jury, along with the court’s instruction (discussed in a previous article) that because Rudy G. didn’t fully cooperate with pretrial fact finding (called discovery), the jury could conclude he was hiding evidence for his benefit.

Effective testimony from the two election workers and no testimony from Rudy G. resulted in a $148 million verdict, including a hefty portion to punish him for his conduct. Ruby Freeman v. Rudolph W. Giuliani, Case No. 1:21-cv-03354 (BAH).