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- Rudy Giuliani has just one lawyer in his defamation trial while the people suing him have 13.
- Giuliani, who claims he's having financial troubles, told Business Insider it's because he's "innocent."
- The judge already ruled he's liable for defamation, the trial is just over damages.
There's a stark divide in Rudy Giuliani's ongoing defamation trial.
At the plaintiff's table in the Washington, D.C., federal court, there's a phalanx of six lawyers sitting with Ruby Freeman and Wandrea "Shaye" Moss, the two Georgia election workers he falsely claimed rigged some of the state's ballots. According to the court docket, they have 13 attorneys representing them in the case overall.
At the defense table, Giuliani sits with just one lawyer representing him: A Texas-based attorney named Joseph D. Sibley.
In a brief hallway interview with Business Insider during the trial's morning break Wednesday, Giuliani said he was outnumbered simply because he didn't need all those lawyers.
"That's because we're innocent," he said. "They have a thousand."
Because the case is a civil one, guilt and innocence aren't at issue in the trial. US District Judge Beryl Howell has already ruled that Giuliani was liable for defaming Moss and Freeman, who he falsely claimed pulled out "suitcases" of fake ballots while calculating Fulton County's results in the 2020 election. Giuliani cited the fake "evidence" to bolster his claims that Donald Trump, rather than Joe Biden, won the 2020 election.
The nine jurors in the trial, Howell said, need to account only for damages that Giuliani must pay.
Lawyers for Freeman and Moss said the amount could be as high as $43.5 million. Moss said in testimony Tuesday that she feared for her life following countless racist and sexist threats and discussed the risks it posed to her career.
On Wednesday, Ashlee Humphries, a professor of consumer sentiment at Northwestern University, testified about the kind of damage Freeman and Moss sustained to their reputations and what it would take to repair it. She tallied up the hundreds of thousands of impressions for each of Giuliani's media appearances where he espoused his false claims about Freeman and Moss and other moments where the claims were repeated.
Giuliani watched the proceedings slumped back in his chair, sitting behind Sibley at the defense table, while plaintiff attorney Michael Gottlieb elicited testimony from Humphries. The former New York City mayor often held his fingers to his mouth and fluttered his lips, as if smoking an invisible cigar.
Giuliani told Business Insider that Humphreys's testimony was "boring so far."
He added that Freeman and Moss had so many lawyers "because it's being funded."
The two are represented by lawyers for Protect Democracy, a nonprofit organization that advocates on behalf of voter rights and to keep law enforcement insulated from political concerns. A representative for Protect Democracy didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Giuliani himself has claimed in court filings that his financial struggles have impeded his ability to keep up with legal obligations for several court cases, but he has avoided actually disclosing financial information to back up those claims.
In August, following a criminal indictment in Georgia alleging he participated in a plot to interfere in the state's election, Giuliani took a private jet to Atlanta for his booking.
"'The dog ate my homework.' 'I have to wash my hair.' 'I can't go out, I'm sick.' Since the dawn of time, people have made up excuses to avoid doing things they do not want to do," lawyers for Smartmatic, a company suing him in a different defamation lawsuit, wrote in a filing. "This is exactly what Giuliani has done here. For months, Giuliani has made up excuses to get out of his discovery obligations to Smartmatic and to violate orders from this Court."