Rudy Giuliani Now Reduced to Fighting to Keep His Refrigerator as He Battles Defamation Judgment and His Former Lawyers
Rudy Giuliani has fallen a long way since the days he was regaled as “America’s Mayor” — as CNN reported Monday he’s now reduced to fighting to keep his refrigerator amid multiple lawsuits seeking to claim his assets.
Giuliani’s support for President-elect Donald Trump’s baseless claims of fraud in the 2020 election have cost him dearly. Besides losing his license to practice law in New York and the District of Columbia and being named a co-defendant along with Trump in the Georgia election interference case, Giuliani is also facing a nearly $150 million judgment plus attorneys’ fees and fines for refusal to comply with discovery in a defamation case against two former Georgia election workers, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss and Ruby Freeman. His former lawyers have sued him for almost $1.4 million in unpaid legal fees. Oh, and Moss and Freeman filed another lawsuit against him for his “repetitive false speech and harassment” targeting them during and after the trial in the first case.
CNN anchor Kate Bolduan reported on Giuliani’s legal woes as he was scheduled to appear in a New York civil court Monday morning fighting the lawsuit filed by his former lawyers. The fact Giuliani was representing himself was a “sign, potentially, of the financial trouble that he has gotten himself into,” said Bolduan.
Kara Scannell, reporting from outside the courtroom, commented that this was “one of the many lawsuits that Giuliani is facing and one of the many bills that he has yet to pay.” According to Scannell, Giuliani was arguing that he signed a retainer agreement with attorney Bob Costello individually, not the firm and Costello was no longer with the firm, and he also never received the invoices.
Bolduan asked about the status of Moss and Freeman’s efforts to collect their judgment. Scannell replied that the deadline had passed on Friday for him to turn over property including about two dozen luxury watches and a 1980 Mercedes Benz that was once owned by movie star Lauren Bacall.
Giuliani’s lawyer said he did turn those items over, said Scannell, and he was now “in the process of turning over his Manhattan penthouse apartment, valued at around $6 million, to these women, but he says now that he wants the refrigerator that is in it. So he’s trying to kind of claw that back — and that’s because under the rules, you can have certain materials that are necessary to live.”
His lawyers were also trying to block some sports memorabilia from being turned over, Scannell said, arguing that some of it was clothing, like a signed Joe DiMaggio shirt. The judge assigned to the case has not yet ruled on that issue, and Moss and Freeman’s attorney had also not yet responded.
“Let’s see what happens today,” said Bolduan. “I mean, quite a situation and a state that Rudy Giuliani has gotten himself into, that now he’s fighting over a refrigerator.”
“I’m kind of obsessed with that refrigerator. Is it like diamond-plated or something? Is it like that episode of Arrested Development? You know, there’s money in the banana stand?”
“I mean, you know, we’ve known politicians have — what they have hidden in the freezers of refrigerators before,” responded Bolduan with a laugh. “So who knows?”
Watch the clip above via CNN.