Rudy Giuliani filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Thursday as he seeks to appeal a jury’s stunning $148 million judgment to two Georgia election workers whom he defamed after the 2020 presidential election.
The filing came a day after the federal judge who oversaw the case handed down an order that would immediately force Giuliani to pay out the judgment awarded to Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, election workers in Fulton County, Georgia in 2020.
The women said the former New York City mayor’s false comments against them after Republican Donald Trump lost Georgia by a narrow margin to Democrat Joe Biden led to death threats that made them fear for their lives.
The judge, Beryl A. Howell, wrote that Giuliani would not be given the typical 30 days out of concern that the former New York mayor would “conceal his assets.”
Giuliani’s political adviser, Ted Goodman, said in a statement that the bankruptcy filing “should be a surprise to no one” because “no person could have reasonably believed that Mayor Rudy Giuliani would be able to pay such a high punitive amount.”
The filing “will afford Mayor Giuliani the opportunity and time to pursue an appeal, while providing transparency for his finances under the supervision of the bankruptcy court, to ensure all creditors are treated equally and fairly throughout the process,” Goodman said.
The filing lists over $152 million in debts, which include, in addition to the $148 defamation judgment, more than seven figures in back taxes, and over $1.5 million in debt to two law firms.
The filing also lists “unknown” amounts of debt from several pending lawsuits, including ones filed by election technology companies Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems, Hunter Biden, and a former employee who accused Giuliani of sexual assault and abuse earlier this year.
Once referred to as “America’s Mayor” in the wake of 9/11, the one-time GOP presidential candidate is now in a financial and legal morass of investigations, fines, and lawsuits because of his work helping Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
Freeman and Moss’s attorney, Michael Gottlieb, told the Washington Post that Giuliani’s “maneuver is unsurprising, and it will not succeed in discharging Mr. Giuliani’s debt.” Under bankruptcy law, debts stemming from a “willful and malicious injury” cannot be discharged. In an appeal, Giuliani is likely to try to relitigate whether his actions qualify as such.
Since the jury handed down its verdict last week, Giuliani has continued to repeat conspiracy theories about Freeman and Moss while denying the jury’s conclusions in the defamation suit.
In an episode of his radio show Thursday, the former Trump advisor and personal attorney called the jury’s $148 million punitive judgment “an irrational amount of money,” adding that the judgment “is so irrational it tells you the trial was irrational because the result is the result of a completely unfair trial.”
Giuliani’s claims led Freeman and Moss to file another lawsuit Monday, seeking a court order to keep Giuliani from repeating the election conspiracies. Giuliani’s statements, written by Freeman and Moss’s attorneys, “make clear that he intends to persist in his campaign of targeted defamation and harassment. It must stop.”
