by As soon as a jury handed down a nearly $150 million defamation judgment against former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, he was out and about again. began to spread the two Georgia election workers at the center of the case. A few days later he declared bankruptcy, protecting himself in the short term from having to hand over all the assets he has to his creditors.
His blatant mockery of the jury and the legal system exposed some disturbing truths about justice. Defamation law is one of the few tools lawyers have to hold people accountable for using lies to destroy reputations and deter crimes. Following the 2020 election, county clerks, election officials and other public servants attacked by politically motivated conspiracy theories like the Big Lie have used defamation lawsuits to try to clear their names and correct the public record.
But in a hyperpartisan era in which the incentives to tell lies about your political opponents can seemingly outweigh the risks, is defamation law still up to the task? And if confessed liars like Giuliani can avoid having to pay, what does accountability look like now?
Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the two election workers who sued Giuliani for falsely claiming that the 2020 election in Georgia was stolen for Joe Biden, will likely see only pennies on the dollar of the total amount a Washington, D.C. jury awarded them.
There are some procedural hurdles to overcome: The bankruptcy proceedings will depend on whether a judge decides that Giuliani’s actions were “deliberate and malicious.” (If they were, he would still have to pay, even in bankruptcy.) Then there is the question of whether he has the money to pay his debts. According to your bankruptcy petition, has between $1 million and $10 million in assets, nowhere near what he would need to pay off the roughly $153 million he says he owes in total. (That number does not include ongoing lawsuits against him that could also lead to financial settlements.) Freeman and Moss could negotiate a settlement with him or choose to claim a percentage of his assets and income for the rest of his working life. life.
Recovering money in a defamation judgment can take time. After juries in Connecticut and Texas found Infowars founder Alex Jones liable for more than $1.4 billion for spreading lies and conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook school shooting, families of victims who They sued him and his companies I spent last year fighting him bankrupt. Only after a judge ruled that Mr. Jones’s conduct had met the requirements “intentional and malicious” Standard ultimately proposed a very reduced deal of $5.5 million a year for five years and then a percentage of his business revenue for the next five. (The Sandy Hook families, who filed their lawsuits nearly six years ago, have offered their own plan to liquidate all of Mr. Jones’ existing assets and leverage his future profits to collect on the jury verdict.)
But plaintiffs’ victories in cases like this are not limited to money. A trial gives victims of viral disinformation the opportunity to confront their tormentor in a court of law, where facts and procedures still matter, offering them a true sense of catharsis and vindication. Especially in cases involving major news events, defamation lawsuits can also help correct the public record. The trial in Freeman v. Giuliani not only demonstrated that Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss had not committed any of the criminal acts that Mr. Giuliani alleged; he exhaustively debunked one of the biggest conspiracy theories to emerge from the 2020 presidential election.
Tens of thousands of articles and television segments amplified the trial’s findings to a mass audience. “This case was never about making Ruby and Shaye rich,” said Michael J. Gottlieb, the lead attorney for the two women. “Of course, we wanted them to be compensated. But this was about accountability and establishing a public record of the truth about what happened at State Farm Arena in November 2020.”
On a societal level, the real hope for these defamation cases is that over time, as more liars are brought down for their actions and held accountable in court, politicians and political operatives will pause before spreading disinformation and, slowly, , this country moves towards a better and safer political discourse. For now, that seems overly optimistic. The twisted incentives created by extreme polarization and a fragmented media landscape could lead a young up-and-comer in conservative (or liberal, for that matter) politics to traffic in misinformation and conspiracy theories if that’s the quickest path to fame, fortune and influence: to hell with the consequences.
Our society relies on libel judgments to draw a line between truth and falsehood, and “we do not imagine that there will routinely be recalcitrant defendants who feel that the incentive to lie to audiences eager to accept those lies is greater than the incentive.” respect the rule of law,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a law professor and media expert at the University of Utah. “Our defamation system doesn’t really provide for that dynamic.” Defamation law itself may be outdated: too slow or too weak to take into account the realities of modern politics.
But there are reasons to be hopeful. As the Giuliani case shows, deterrence can take many forms. When Mr. Giuliani uttered more lies about Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss shortly after the verdict, they filed a lawsuit. new demand in the same court, requesting a court order preventing him from continuing to defame them. If successful, that case could be the strongest protection they have against being in the spotlight again.
Even without a court order, now that a court has ruled that Giuliani defamed the two women with actual malice (meaning that he knowingly or recklessly made the false statements in question), media outlets large and small may hesitate to give him a platform. Even if the ruling doesn’t punish Giuliani, he will almost certainly make networks like Fox News and One America News think twice before putting him on the air.
More than updating defamation law or passing new legislation, the way to send a signal to future Rudy Giulianis and Alex Jones is to stand up for victims of widespread lies (and the broader truth) on a large scale. One of the legal organizations that represented Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss, Protect Democracy, is trying to do just that. The group is also representing them in a separate lawsuit against right-wing blog The Gateway Pundit and represents a Pennsylvania postal worker defamed by Project Veritas, a county recorder in Arizona attacked by Republican candidate Kari Lake and a voter in Georgia accused of being a “ electoral mule.” ”by Dinesh D’Souza.
These cases will test whether our legal system can evolve to meet the challenges posed by our viral era. But at least Freeman and Moss have shown that you don’t have to be rich or powerful to achieve justice.
Andy Kroll (@AndyKroll) is a ProPublica reporter and author of “A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy.”
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