The two women, who were defamed by Rudolph W. Giuliani after the 2020 election, have accused him of trying to keep his multimillion-dollar condo in Florida from debt collection.
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Ruby Freeman, left, and Shaye Moss were awarded $148 million last year in a defamation suit against Rudolph W. Giuliani.
The Georgia election workers defamed by Rudolph W. Giuliani in the aftermath of the 2020 election filed a civil suit against him on Friday, accusing him of trying to keep his multimillion-dollar condominium in Florida out of their reach in debt collection.
Mr. Giuliani, the onetime personal lawyer to former President Donald J. Trump, filed for bankruptcy last year after a federal jury determined he should pay the two election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, $148 million for spreading lies about them as part of his efforts to help Mr. Trump stay in office.
A New York bankruptcy judge dismissed Mr. Giuliani’s case last month because of his failure to comply with basic court requirements.
Mr. Giuliani signed an affidavit on July 13 stating that his Florida residence was his primary home, and therefore not eligible to be seized by his creditors under Florida law. But that is not enough under Florida law to establish primary residency.
According to the complaint, Mr. Giuliani has spent very little time at the condo in Palm Beach, Fla.
“He is trying to ‘toy with’ Florida’s homestead exemption to shield a multimillion-dollar asset from his creditors,” the women said in the complaint, filed in the Southern District of New York, where Mr. Giuliani was once a U.S. attorney.
Citing publicly available evidence from Mr. Giuliani’s internet broadcasts, the complaint said that in the past 47 days, he had been somewhere other than Palm Beach for 34 of them.
Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss said in the complaint that Mr. Giuliani was still a New York resident. (He put his New York condo on the market this summer.)
The women, who are mother and daughter, placed a lien on the Palm Beach condo on Aug. 8. Their lawyers say that after the lien was filed, Mr. Giuliani could not protect the condo from being seized as part of the defamation judgment, even if he later declared with evidence that it was his primary residence.
“To be clear, he still has not,” the complaint said.
As part of his dismissal from bankruptcy court, Mr. Giuliani cannot file for bankruptcy protections for a year.
A spokesman for Mr. Giuliani did not respond to a question about the location of Mr. Giuliani’s permanent residence.
Seamus Hughes contributed research.
Eileen Sullivan covers breaking news, the Justice Department, the trials against Donald J. Trump and the Biden administration. More about Eileen Sullivan
See more on: Ruby Freeman, Rudolph W. Giuliani, U.S. Politics
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Source: nytimes.com
