A noun, a verb and the end of Rudy Giuliani
The pain from the injustice of enduring a publicly uttered false accusation is so rancorous and so horrible to our species that its prohibition is recorded by ancients as the ninth of the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not bear false witness.” You can only imagine how infinitely worse that pain must be when the false witness-bearer in question is the president of the United States and his poison dwarf of a lawyer, and millions of idiots believe them and want to destroy your life or even murder you on that account.
Welcome to the nightmare world of Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. Both women love their county, both women were proud to serve their country as state election workers, and both women were recklessly betrayed by the president of the United States and his drunken pervert and fool of a lawyer, “America’s mayor” Rudy Giuliani.
Trump and Giuliani falsely accused both women of election fraud based on not a single solitary shred of evidence. They did it because they could, they did it because they were powerful, they did it because they were too weak and too cowardly to face the undeniable fact that they lost the 2020 presidential election. And they needed somebody — anybody! — to blame. And they didn’t give a shit whose lives they ruined while doing so.
Giuliani said the mother and daughter team of Freeman and Moss were passing USB drives “like vials of heroin or cocaine” during ballot-counting operations. Moss later explained to the January 6 Committee that her mother was actually innocently handing her a ginger mint during ballot counting.
Well, for Rudy Giuliani anyway, that evil, hateful and life-destroying lie has finally come home to roost. Because he is a coward, Giuliani refuses to come out and explicitly say that he was lying about the two women, but he does stipulate that their claim is actionable in order to avoid further litigation. For that admission the judge in the federal court in Washington DC where the two women are suing him has ordered Giuliani to pay both women’s attorney costs. The total is approximately $130,000.
That is just the beginning of the drunken little bastard’s troubles. The judge’s order means Giuliani will now face a civil trial in federal court in Washington to determine how much he will have to pay for destroying the lives of both women. His guilt is already established. All that remains is to decide how much money his guilt is worth for the permanent loss of both women’s personal security.
Giuliani has fallen a long way since the days he was respected and admired as the solemn mayor of New York City during the September 11 attacks. He has since attempted to milk that reputation as much as possible. Joe Biden once famously said of Giuliani that there’s only three things Giuliani needed to make a sentence: a noun, a verb and 9/11.
These days Giuliani rationalises his hateful slander of Moss and Freeman by falsely claiming it’s speech protected by the First Amendment. So you might say all Rudy needs today is a noun, a verb and the First Amendment. But however Giuliani tries to sugarcoat it, he is a despicable monster who has stolen the lives of two kind and good women, and he should burn forever in infamy for doing so. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.