The judge presiding over the defamation lawsuit against former New York City Mayor and ex-Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani has issued an immediate enforcement of judgment in the case on Wednesday.
Typically, Giuliani would be entitled to a 30-day “automatic stay for enforcement of judgment pending resolution of any appeal.” However, the plaintiffs sought to eliminate this automatic stay, a move contested by Giuliani as unconventional in court documents. U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, on Wednesday, decided to dissolve the standard 30-day grace period, deeming it “both appropriate and warranted.”
On the previous Friday, a jury had directed Giuliani to pay $148 million to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss after the former mayor had defamed the Georgia election workers, accusing them of engaging in election fraud. In a joint stipulation submitted on Monday, the involved parties agreed to reduce the amount to nearly $146 million, citing it as the “resolution of any setoff claim” Giuliani might have, stemming from Freeman and Moss’s settlement with defendants named in the initial complaint in May 2022.
The immediate enforcement of judgment is justified, according to Howell, due to “several considerations” pointing to the “risk that Giuliani may attempt to ‘conceal and dissipate [his] assets'” during the aforementioned 30-day period. The judge presiding
In a parallel development, both Freeman and Moss initiated a new lawsuit against Giuliani on Monday, seeking to “permanently bar” him from making further defamatory statements about them.
The complaint filed on Monday asserts, “Defendant Giuliani has engaged in, and is engaging in, a continuing course of repetitive false speech and harassment — specifically, repeating over and over the same lies that Plaintiffs engaged in election fraud during their service as election workers during the 2020 presidential election.”