Giuliani ordered to pay $148.1 million in damages

It looks like the jury was well and truly angered by the way Rudy Giuliani treated the two poll workers Ruby Freeman daughter Shaye Moss in Georgia and unanimously ordered him to pay them whopping damages, well above the $48 million their lawyer suggested.

Giuliani said that he will appeal but then proceeded to absurdly claim that he could still prove his claims.

Giuliani, meanwhile, doubled down on his false claims about Freeman and Moss, saying again that he had evidence they were true.

“The absurdity of the number merely underscores the absurdity of the entire proceeding where I’ve not been able to offer one piece of evidence in defense, which I have a lot,” Giuliani said in a short press gaggle, promising to appeal the result.

“So I am quite confident when this case gets before a fair tribunal it will be reversed so quickly that it will make your head spin and the absurd number that just came in will help that, actually.”

He also continued to insist that his claims about the two women were justified. “I have no doubt that my comments were made and they were supportable and they are supportable today,” he said.

He has had plenty of opportunities to provide the evidence and prove his case and still has not done so. Even his lawyer did not bring up that defense in this trial, because Giuliani had in an earlier proceeding conceded that he had defamed the two women. While his lawyer expressed some contrition on his behalf, Giuliani seems to be living in a dream world where he thinks his lies will be believed.

Giuliani refused to turn over documents as part of the case and conceded earlier this year that he made false statements about the women. Howell found him liable of defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress and civil conspiracy. The only question for the jury to decide was how much in damages Giuliani should pay.

Joseph Sibley, Giuliani’s attorney, conceded to jurors in his opening statement that his client had done something wrong by making false statements. But over the course of the week, he sought to distance Giuliani from the threats and harassment that resulted from the false statements. He also argued that the tens of millions of dollars they requested were not proportional to the harm they had suffered.

I really think Giuliani is delusional.

Giuliani the coward faces the reckoning

Rudy Giuliani’s trial is over. His lawyer did not call any witnesses for the defense. The jurors deliberated for about three hours yesterday before adjourning and will resume their work today.

Beryl Howell, the US district judge, had already found him liable for defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and civil conspiracy when he publicly attacked Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two Georgia election workers, accusing them of switching votes from serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) to Joe Biden. This trial was for eight members of the jury to decide how much in damages the two workers were entitled to for the hell that they went through at the hands of SSAT’s supporters because of Giuliani’s lies.

In his closing statement, the women’s lawyer Michael Gottlieb described the harrowing experiences that the two women had undergone because of Giuliani’s vicious attacks.

Attorneys for Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss are urging the panel to award the women $24 million apiece for Giuliani’s defamation against them, which they say ignited years of threats, professional and personal consequences and devastation of their mental health. Moss and Freeman are also asking for an unspecified additional amount for emotional distress, as well as a “punitive” award to deter future misconduct.
…

“He has no right to offer defenseless civil servants up to a virtual mob in order to overturn an election,” Gottlieb said during his closing argument. “The cost that has [been] imposed on Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss, on all those he has deceived, and to the public confidence in our democracy are incalculable.”

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Undermining the model minority myth

Kal Penn, this week’s guest host on The Daily Show, did his bit to undermine the model minority myth by having a discussion on politics with a group of Indian-Americans, in which most of the men revealed themselves to be utterly smug, self-satisfied, opinionated, arrogant, and ignorant, older versions of Vivek Ramaswamy. I wish I could suggest that Penn had picked a particularly obnoxious group but my own experience with other people from the Indian subcontinent, including Sri Lankans, supports the view that of course while not everyone is like that, the negative impression that especially the older men gave is not at all uncommon.

Add ‘compassion’ to the ‘thoughts and prayers’ cop-out

Whenever there is a mass shooting, sadly so common in the US, the gun lobby and its servile politicians quickly repeat the ‘thoughts and prayers’ trope to avoid having to say anything about what might be done to stop the killings. Thanks to much ridicule, I notice that they are trying to avoid saying that and find different ways to say and do nothing. We are now seeing something similar with abortion.

Abortion has become a hot potato for Republican politicians who have long been stridently calling for the overthrow of Roe v. Wade but having achieved that goal, are now struggling to find ways to respond to the draconian anti-abortion laws passed by red states that are widely seen as political liabilities.

Take the case of Kate Cox who had to travel out of Texas in order to get an abortion that her physician had said was necessary because the fetus had a serious defect that made survival highly unlikely even for a few days after birth, and also risked the life of the mother and her ability to have more children. The Republican presidential candidates Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis were asked about whether they agreed with Texas attorney general Ken Paxton’s action that forced Cox to go out of state and they ducked the question and resorted to calling for ‘compassion’.
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Judge asks Giuliani’s lawyer: Is he mentally competent?

Rudy Giuliani, lawyer and advisor to serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT), has long been behaving erratically and provided plenty of comedic fodder to late night talk show hosts. But his recent behavior in one particular case has caused the judge overseeing it to wonder whether he was in fact losing his marbles.

The case arose from the defamation suit filed by Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, a mother and daughter who were poll workers in Atlanta, GA whom Giuliani had publicly accused of changing votes in favor of Joe Biden, and he also threw in the gratuitous implication that they were drug users, saying that they were “quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine” and that it was obvious they were “engaged in surreptitious illegal activity.” In an earlier proceeding, Giuliani conceded that the statements were false but that they were protected by the First Amendment.

But yesterday, outside the courtroom after the first day of the trial for damages, Giuliani said that he would prove that his allegations were true, which made the clearly incredulous judge ask his lawyer if Giuliani was all there, since his statements made him liable for a second defamation charge. Giuliani’s lawyer did not seem to be sure how to answer.
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Film review: The Duke (2022)

I recently watched this nice little comedy set in 1961 that stars Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren in which Broadbent plays a working class character who keeps losing his job and getting into trouble because of his efforts to fight for those whom he sees as being unfairly treated, such as old pensioners and disabled veterans of wars, trying to get the government to waive for them the licensing fees that the owners of every television must pay the government and which goes towards funding the BBC.

This film is based on the life of a real person Kempton Bunton and the theft of a painting of the Duke of Wellington that was stolen from the National Gallery, and the trial of Bunton for stealing it. (The link has spoilers for the film.) It is a film that gets its laughs from the behavior of the characters, not from jokes, and Broadbent and Mirren, two excellent actors, have the skills to make the most of their roles.

Here’s the trailer.

One thing I was curious about was how Bunton was able to get a high-powered barrister to represent him at his trial since he clearly would not have been able to afford one. Since this theft really happened, I looked Bunton up and found a link to the lawyer Jeremy Hutchinson who had a privileged background with an elite education that led to an illustrious career and was married at the time to the already-famous actress Peggy Ashcroft.

I do not know the British legal aid system and how this came to be. Maybe because Bunton’s case gained a great deal of notoriety at the time and he became something of a folk hero, a Robin Hood type fighting the establishment, Hutchinson provided his services pro bono.

Kate Cox leaves Texas for her abortion

After the Texas supreme court lifted the hold on the law banning abortions that a judge had imposed, Cox had a difficult decision to make: wait and if the supreme court would ultimately rule in her favor or leave the state. Since the court gave no gave no time for the decision, they may well have just run out the clock. So she opted to go to another state to have her abortion.

A pregnant Texas woman who was seeking court permission for an abortion in an unprecedented challenge to one of the most restrictive bans in the U.S. could not wait any longer and went to another state, her attorneys said Monday.

The announcement came as Kate Cox, whose fetus has a fatal condition, was waiting for the Texas Supreme Court to rule whether she could legally receive an abortion. Her baby’s diagnosis has low survival rates and her attorneys said continuing the pregnancy jeopardized both her health and ability to have more children.

“Her health is on the line. She’s been in and out of the emergency room and she couldn’t wait any longer,” said Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which was representing Cox.

This likely makes her case moot. Fortunately for Cox, she appears to have the resources to carry out her decision. This still leaves in limbo other pregnant women who need to have an abortion. Meanwhile a pregnant woman in Kentucky, another anti-abortion state, has asked a court to allow an abortion and is awaiting a result.

Vivek Ramaswamy creates a new facet of the model minority myth

As an immigrant from South Asia I am of course familiar with the model minority myth that surrounds that community, that we are high achievers in many areas (other than sports), from mathematics to science to business to spelling. But Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has created a new frontier, that we can also be world-class assholes.

Desi Lydic of The Daily Show has a nice compilation showing how Ramaswamy tries to be everything to everyone, to ingratiate himself with diverse groups of people while at the same time having a repellent personality.

I do not normally use words like ‘asshole’ but frankly, I could not find a better descriptor for him. The word ‘jerk’ simply does not do justice to how disgustingly smug, arrogant, and annoying he is. My ire may be also greater because he and I share the same ethnicity of being Tamils, although he is from India and I from Sri Lanka. I would hate for people to think that he and I are alike in other ways too, which is what ethnic stereotyping tends to do.

Susanna Gibson speaks out

Just before the elections in November, I posted about Susanna Gibson, a nurse practitioner running for a seat in the Virginia House of Representatives. She and her husband had in the past live-streamed sex acts. It was all perfectly legal but some Republican operative had obtained the video and shopped it around to media outlets and the Washington Post had published it. Then flyers with that information were mailed out by the Republican party to voters in that district. To their credit, most of the Democratic party rallied around her but in the end she lost a close race 17,878 to 16,912, a margin of just 966 or 2.8%. The fact that it was so close means that she might well have won otherwise.

Gibson has given an interview about the whole affair and about what people need to realize about the whole online experience.

I think a big underlying factor that really needs to be addressed, and our society needs to start being educated on, is there is this devaluation and misunderstanding of consent, especially when we’re talking about digital privacy. Content that is initially made in a consensual context, which is then distributed in a non-consensual context digitally, is a crime. Just because someone consented to share something in one particular context doesn’t mean that it is or should be fair game for the whole world to see.

Choosing to share content, online or in whatever medium, with select people with the understanding that it will disappear and can only be seen by those present at the time — when we’re talking live streaming, webcamming and Skype — that is a far cry from consenting for that content to be recorded and then broadly disseminated. And there is case law precedent confirming this.

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The nightmare for Kate Cox continues

The Texas supreme court has put on hold the restraining order that a lower court judge had imposed that would have allowed Kate Cox to get an abortion, stating that her condition met the requirements for an exception to the state’s almost total ban on the procedure. The Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, a Republican anti-abortion zealot, had appealed to the supreme court for such a move. Even before the supreme. court stepped in, Paxton went even further and said that he would prosecute any doctor and hospital that allowed the procedure even if the courts rule it to be permissible. So much for the party that says that it is the upholder of law and order.
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