As part of the defamation verdict against him Rudy Giuliani has been ordered to hand over his assets to pay the amount he owes to two Georgia election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss.
Rudy Giuliani has relinquished dozens of watches and a Mercedes once owned by movie star Lauren Bacall to two former Georgia election workers who won a $148m defamation judgment against him, his lawyer said.
Joseph Cammarata said in a letter filed late on Friday in Manhattan federal court that the trove of watches and a ring were delivered by FedEx to a bank in Atlanta, Georgia, in the morning.
The 1980 Mercedes-Benz SL 500 was turned over at an address in Hialeah, Florida, and an undisclosed amount of funds from Giuliani’s Citibank accounts were also surrendered to the two women who won the judgment, according to the letter.
…A jury previously ruled that Giuliani owes Freeman and Moss around $150m for spreading lies about them after the 2020 election though Giuliani is appealing the ruling. Liman authorized the two women to immediately begin selling the assets.
…Giuliani was also ordered to turn over his apartment on the Upper East Side of New York and several items of Yankees memorabilia. The two women are also entitled to fees the Trump campaign owes Giuliani for his legal work in 2020.
…Representatives for Freeman and Moss said last week that they visited Giuliani’s Manhattan apartment only to discover it was cleared out well before the October deadline. Giuliani first listed the three-bedroom apartment for $6.5m in 2023, but had cut the price to a little more than $5.1m this fall.
Liman did not order Giuliani to turn over a separate Palm Beach condominium, for now, amid an ongoing legal dispute there. Liman instead entered an order barring Giuliani from selling the condo while that dispute is ongoing.
One thing that struck me is that Giuliani owned ‘dozens’ of watches. Why would anyone own so many watches? Are they like jewelry, that he changes to match his clothes on any given day? But how many different colored outfits can one man have? And who the hell notices the watches on a man’s wrist and is impressed by seeing a variety, changing from day to day? I assume that these must be very expensive watches in order to be worth being included in the settlement. Are expensive watches considered investments that appreciate with time, like works of art?
All my life I have had only one watch at a time, getting a new one only when the old one dies. For the last decade or so, I’ve had a traditional watch made by Citizen that keeps excellent time. The only occasions where I have to adjust it is twice yearly when the clocks change due to the daylight savings time shifts. It is powered by ambient light and never requires batteries. But my daughters were worried that since I am old and live mostly alone, that I might suffer a fall at home and be incapacitated and unable to call for help. This happens quite frequently in the US because of the aging population. Since they know that I tend to dismiss such concerns and am a minimalist when it comes to possessions and do not like to buy more stuff than I think is absolutely necessary, one of them gifted me an Apple watch. It does lots of things but the main feature that appeals to them is that it detects falls and allows you to call for assistance. If you do not move or take any action for a couple of minutes, the watch calls for help on your behalf. It also has some nifty features, the one that is most useful for me being reminders every hour to get up and walk around briefly. I like that feature because I tend to work on my computer and read a lot and can get so absorbed in what I am doing that I can be sedentary for long periods of time and that is not good for anyone.
So now I have two watches, which is one too many. I am trying out the Apple watch to see if I like it sufficiently to decide to keep it. If so, I will give away my old watch since I do not see the point of having more than one.
But Giuliani has, or had, dozens of watches. Baffling.
…and he realized and said aloud in one of his depositions or virtual court hearings that he was wearing two of them at once…
Why would anyone own so many watches?
Maybe they’d been given to him as bribes?
I understand where you’re coming from, and perhaps I can assuage your discomfort at ostensibly owning two watches -- you don’t.
You own ONE watch (the Citizen). It is presumably somewhat aesthetically pleasing, and it keeps good time. That’s a watch.
The other thing you own, the Apple product, is NOT a watch, any more than an iPhone is a phone. It is a multifunctional computer. You only think of it as a watch because of Apple marketing.
Yes, of course, absolutely. Assuming Giuliani didn’t collect cheap plastic novelty watches like those available from Tokyoflash, he’s probably got a rack of Rolexes, Tag Heuers, Omegas and the like. If you keep them with all the accompanying paperwork and the original case they come in, they absolutely are investments. A friend of my paid several thousand pounds for a Rolex, wore it and enjoyed doing so for about five years, then sold it for several hundred pounds more than he’d paid for it. Another guy I know had a Ferrari for a couple of years, and by luck that sold for much more than he’d paid for it because rich people started putting their money in classic cars after the financial crisis of 2008. Mugs like us buy watches and cars that lose value. RIch people buy stuff that just gets more valuable as it gets older. It’s a different world.
You underestimate the lure of collecting. I came this close to buying a Rolex Submariner 116613 a little over ten years ago. I could afford it, I’d been a little obsessed with the thing since seeing one on the wrist of a colleague, and there didn’t seem good reason not to. The daft thing is, if I had, I’d probably hardly ever have worn it -- you don’t go kitesurfing in a ten-grand watch. Then I discovered you could buy what are called “homages” -- things that look very similar, but don’t come with the eye-watering price tag. They’re not “fakes” -- they’re logoed products of another company, with a design very close to the original. Since my interest was in the design, rather than the cachet of the Rolex name or trying to impress anyone with my watch, I bought a homage. Then another, better one. Then another, even better one. Then one of a slightly different design. Then another watch of a completely different design that promised a smoother sweeping second hand. Since I already had a watch before I started this nonsense, I now owned SIX watches, three of which you’d not be able to tell apart from five yards away. They were cheap enough (<£500) that I would wear one every day though, and looking at them gave me pleasure. It stopped there, for me, but people go down collecting rabbit holes for all sorts of things. I know people who own more lightsabers than I’d consider sensible (i.e. more than one), and one of my friends has an entire room in his house filled with 1:12 scale models of sports cars, some of them indistinguishable from each other to my eye.
I don’t think any of that is Giuliani’s motivation, though. Strikes me that growing up poor with a jailbird felon for a father, buying expensive watches is something he just sees as a thing rich people do, and a place to stash money. He probably thinks it’s classy, and for the American definition of class, it is.
Yes.
Also yes. In fact, they’re not like works of art, they are works of art, and are collected in exactly the same way.
Nobody needs a watch to tell the time anymore, and even if you do, a modestly-priced quartz watch will do at least as good a job as a Patek Phillipe Calatrava. If you’re thinking of them in utilitarian terms, you’re completely missing the point.
Expensive watches are a status symbol right now. Guys buy multiple expensive watches for the same reason rich guys have multiple cars or a woman a huge collection of handbags. There is a certain element of collecting special items but mostly it’s just status symbols to show off.
Giuliani likely got some of them as gifts, a popular politician will collect a lot of status symbols like that if they want. Instead of getting paid for a speech the organization will arraign to give him some valuable status symbol item.
Last summer I visited the local Clock Museum. They had opened a Voutilainen exhibition, with several of his watches on display. Including The First One he ever made, when he was still a student at the local clockmaker school (almost within sight of the museum). Today the wait time for his new watches is eight YEARS. The boy has gotten pretty far.
His chronographs are accurate to five digits, which is quite an achievement for a mechanical clock. The funny thing is that a ten dollar beach rolex is accurate to SIX digits, because it is a quartz clock.
P.S. I have a dozen cameras, but at least they are all different. Imelda Marcos had 3000 pairs of shoes.
Same reason NIST operates multiple atomic clocks. It improves accuracy and makes it easier to spot defective units if you’re constantly comparing drift against weighted averages of the others.
Giuliani’s practicing proper metrology. Good for him.
I hate watches. Having something strapped to my wrist is uncomfortable. Wearing one also made me feel like a slave to the clock. Philosophically, I also dislike watching my life tick away, minute by minute. Fortunately I’ve never had a job or engaged in activities that required me to keep close track of time.
I’ve always had enough time displays around the house (stove, microwave, VCR, etc.) to keep me informed of when I need to do things and I’d carry a cheap watch in my pocket when out and about to make sure I’m on schedule for appointments but never needed to check it frequently enough that I had to have it strapped to my wrist.
Nowadays I carry a phone which shows the time so I haven’t even owned a watch for going on 15 years.
MattP @ # 1: … he was wearing two of them at once…
Reminds me of a story I read about the once-famous Buckminster Fuller, an engineer who became enough of a celebrity that he spent much of his time traveling around giving talks.
Fuller often got into hassles with customs inspectors, because he wore three watches: one set to the time zone where he was, one to the zone he expected to go to next, and one to his home’s zone. (This was about 50 years ago, when an electronic watch with multiple settings was science fiction.) The inspectors were sure he was up to No Good: watch smuggling, perhaps.
This is nothing new. In the 1970s/early 1980s, the Swiss watch company, Swatch, rolled out affordable-to-the-middle-class colored plastic watchbands for their watches and set off a frenzy of collecting every color akin to the current craze of collecting Stanley waterbottles in every different color. Or people (mostly young-to-middle-aged men) who collect hundreds of sneakers all in slightly different colors and styles. And who can forget the Beanie Baby-collecting craze of the 1990s? The difference between those collectors and people like Giuliani is that Guliani’s collection-of-choice is very expensive--like people who collect paintings or sculptures or ridiculously-expensive cars.
I am surprised no one has brought up Imelda Marcos -- wife of former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos- and her collection of thousands of shoes. If your husband is a corrupt politician you can indulge in whatever vulgar grasping of status symbols you like.
birgerjohansson@11: Please see comment of Lassi Hippeläinen @6.