By Luc Cohen
NEW YORK (Reuters) -Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani took the witness stand on Friday to try to fend off a bid to have him held in contempt of court by two Georgia election workers that he falsely accused of trying to help steal the 2020 U.S. presidential election for Democrat Joe Biden.
The election workers, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea Moss, say Giuliani has not complied with U.S. District Judge Lewis (JO:LEWJ) Liman's orders to give up his Manhattan apartment, title to a 1980 Mercedes and sports memorabilia as payment toward a $148 million defamation verdict in their favor.
Freeman and Moss sued Giuliani - a former personal lawyer to Republican President-elect Donald Trump - in 2021, accusing him of destroying their reputations. Giuliani made repeated false claims that a surveillance video showed the pair concealing and counting suitcases filled with illegal ballots at a basketball arena in Atlanta that was used to process votes during the 2020 election.
Two years later, Giuliani conceded he made defamatory statements about them, and a judge ruled he was liable for defamation as a sanction against him for failing to turn over electronic records to Moss and Freeman.
A Washington, D.C., jury later ordered he pay Freeman and Moss roughly $73 million in compensation and $75 million as punishment.
Lawyers for Freeman and Moss say Giuliani has not given them all the property he is required to. At Friday's hearing in Manhattan federal court, they urged Liman to hold him in contempt and punish him by finding he did not treat a Palm Beach, Florida, condominium he owns as his permanent residence, meaning it could be turned over.
Giuliani, 80, has claimed that his day-to-day life has been upended by the two election workers, making it difficult to obtain necessary paperwork, and that he has not "willfully disobeyed" any court orders.
He has also said he relied on his previous lawyers in the case to comply with information requests from Freeman and Moss.
Those lawyers, Kenneth Caruso and David Labkowski, withdrew in November, saying it was in part because Giuliani refused to comply with those requests.
'YOU MADE ME LOOK LIKE MY DOG'
A contempt citation in the district where he had been the top federal prosecutor would mark a further fall from grace for Giuliani, once known as "America's Mayor" for his response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Giuliani has been disbarred for making false claims about the 2020 election, and pleaded not guilty to criminal charges in Georgia and Arizona that he aided Trump's failed attempt to overturn his loss.
During a break in the hearing, Giuliani asked courtroom sketch artist Jane Rosenberg whether she would make him look "nice," said Rosenberg, who was documenting the hearing for Reuters. He criticized a drawing Rosenberg made of him in a prior proceeding by scrunching his face into a scowl.
"You made me look like my dog," Giuliani said, according to Rosenberg.
Lawyers for the election workers also say Giuliani failed to send them documents that would have helped them determine whether he must turn over the Florida condominium.
Giuliani's new lawyer, Joseph Cammarata, said Giuliani had "substantially if not nearly fully complied" with the election workers' requests, but said they asked him for an "astronomical" amount of information as he faced multiple other legal entanglements.
"Mr. Giuliani is an 80-year-old man who has been hit with a whirlwind of discovery demands in multiple jurisdictions," Cammarata said.