By In the end, Rudy Giuliani has followed Donald Trump to the end of his rope. On Thursday, the former mayor of New York City filed for bankruptcy. The move comes only a few days after a court ordered Rudy to pay a massive sum in damages to two former Georgia election workers he falsely accused of fraud while working on the former president’s efforts to reverse Biden’s victory in the Peach State.
“In an unsparing, 57-page ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell said Giuliani had flagrantly violated her orders to preserve and produce relevant evidence to the election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, resulting in a “default” judgment against him. She also ordered him to pay Freeman and Moss “punitive” damages for failing to fulfill his obligations,” Politico reported over the summer.
In 2021, Freeman and Moss, a mother and daughter, sued Rudy Giuliani for unspecified damages after he allegedly “targeted the two women as President Donald Trump and his allies spread the lie that the 2020 election was stolen….’One of Giuliani’s false accusations included a claim that Moss handed her mother a thumb drive ‘like they were vials of heroin or cocaine’ as the two worked at the State Farm Arena for the Fulton County Board of Elections in 2020. In reality, Moss has said her mother had just handed her a ginger mint.”
Guiliani, who was known as “America’s mayor” for his leadership of New York after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, faces a crush of debts stemming from his work on former President Trump’s behalf. He also faces criminal charges in Georgia, Reuters noted.
In a filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York, Giuliani said he had between $100 million and $500 million in liabilities and $1 million to $10 million in assets.
A spokesperson for Giuliani said the bankruptcy filing will give him time to appeal the $148 million penalty and ensure that other creditors are treated fairly.
“No person could have reasonably believed that Mayor Rudy Giuliani would be able to pay such a high punitive amount,” spokesperson Ted Goodman said.
Although Giuliani has been one of Donald Trump’s most loyal allies, the former president refused to help pay for his legal bills, despite allegedly owing him a huge amount of money.
In August, CNBC claimed that “former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Trump and Giuliani had a handshake agreement that Giuliani and his team would get paid by the Trump political operation for their post-election work, according to Timothy Parlatore, an attorney for longtime Giuliani ally Bernard Kerik.
But the Trump campaign and its affiliated committees ultimately did not honor that pledge, according to campaign finance records. The records show that Giuliani’s companies were only reimbursed for travel and not the $20,000 a day he requested to be paid.
Parlatore also told CNBC that the Giuliani operation was never compensated for its work. According to Parlatore, the failure to pay Giuliani and his team came up last week in a private interview between prosecutors on special counsel Jack Smith’s team and Kerik, a member of Giuliani’s team in late 2020.”
That same month, the former mayor was reported to have made a “desperate” appeal to Trump, asking him for help to pay his bills, but the former president only agreed to cover a small sum.
Time eventually ran out.
The New York Times wrote, “In October, the I.R.S. placed a lien on Mr. Giuliani’s property in Palm Beach, Fla., for his failure to pay more than $500,000 in income taxes. Mr. Giuliani and his ex-wife tried to sell it for $3.3 million in 2019 but did not find a buyer, The Palm Beach Daily News reported at the time.
Mr. Giuliani is also trying to sell his Upper East Side apartment in New York for $6.1 million.
Mr. Giuliani made millions of dollars a year in private law practice after he left public office. His divorce from his third wife exposed the couple’s once-lavish lifestyle with a $230,000-a-month spending habit, six houses and 11 country club memberships.
In May 2018, as he left his law firm to work with Mr. Trump, Mr. Giuliani had about $1.2 million in cash and about $40,000 in credit card debt, according to recently released documents that were part of a criminal investigation that never led to any charges. The documents show that by early 2019, Mr. Giuliani was down to $400,000 in cash and had up to $110,000 in credit card debt.
At the beginning of the federal trial to determine damages owed to Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss, Mr. Giuliani’s lawyer, Joseph Sibley IV, warned that even $43 million would be the civil equivalent of the death penalty.”
According to the Associated Press, after the verdict, Giuliani remained defiant, saying “he would appeal, repeated his claims that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, insisted he did nothing wrong and suggested he would keep pressing his claims even if that means losing all his money or ending up in jail.”
[Read More: The Ballot Wars Have Begun]
