Faith Prince and Nathan Lane. If you don't know the show, what makes it sublime is that he really does have to go to a prayer meeting, not because he's got religion but because he's lost a bet.
All right, explain this to me like I'm a five-year-old. I mean with a fairly big vocabulary for a five-year-old, but some innocence:
Rudy Giuliani, who served as a lawyer for former president Donald Trump, is no longer contesting as a legal matter that he made false and defamatory statements about two former Georgia election workers — but argues in a new court filing that what amounted to false claims about vote-rigging in the 2020 presidential election was constitutionally protected speech and did not damage the workers.
"So I made a bunch of false and defamatory statements about you, that's some kind of reason for taking me to court?"
Yes, Rudolf, that's supposedly how it works. He was sued by Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the mother and daughter working on the Fulton County ballot count who were seen on video doing something Giuliani described as pulling fake ballots out of suitcases, like drug dealers "passing out dope", and "crooks" who "obviously" stuffed ballots, an accusation subsequently taken up by then-president Donald Trump, with the result that the two women's lives were completely upended, as they told the House January 6 committee a little over a year later:
“It was just a lot of horrible things there,” Moss said at a hearing Tuesday before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Many of the messages were racist and “hateful,” said Moss, who is Black. “A lot of threats wishing death upon me, telling me I’ll be in jail with my mother and saying things like, ‘Be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920.’ ”
That was only the beginning. Moss eventually stopped going to the grocery store, where she feared acquaintances might say her name and call attention from believers of Trump’s voter-fraud claims. Election deniers showed up at the home of her grandmother and tried to push their way in to search for evidence of fraud. Both she and her mother, Ruby Freeman, were forced into hiding. They quit their jobs with the Fulton County Department of Registration and Elections, where Moss had proudly served as a poll worker for more than a decade.
You know what the 1920 reference means, right? "Southern trees bear a strange fruit..."
Aaron Blake of the Washington Post explains the purpose of the confession is "merely a legal tactic":
his lawyer Joseph D. Sibley IV says Giuliani “does not admit to Plaintiffs’ allegations” but that he is conceding the argument in order to move the case forward. Giuliani’s team has indicated that, rather than defending the content of the statements, it could instead argue that they were First Amendment-protected speech and/or that Freeman and Moss might not have actually suffered damages.
“Those out to smear the mayor are ignoring the fact that this stipulation is designed to get to the legal issues of the case,” Giuliani aide Ted Goodman said.
But there are no legal issues unless you deny the facts, as far as I can see. The facts are that defamatory speech isn't protected by the First Amendment, the speech was obviously defamatory as Giuliani now admits, and the plaintiffs definitely suffered damages. You couldn't ignore it if you watched them on TV during the committee hearings.
Blake also notes a trend of similar arguments, with reference to Sidney Powell's defense of her false claims of voter fraud in Michigan in 2020, which she said "reasonable people would not accept... as fact," as not meant to be taken at face value—she was just advocating for the people who wrongly believed them—and Jenna Ellis admitting to ten specific misrepresentations of the 2020 election results when she was acting "with at least a reckless state of mind". I wonder if we're seeing a kind of institutionalization of Tucker Carlson's clown defense against the libel suit of Trump's Playboy model Karen McDougal, when he claimed in a live broadcast that she had "approached Donald Trump and threatened to ruin his career and humiliate his family if he doesn't give them money" in a "classic act of extortion." Carlson's lawyers argued that he "could not be understood to have been stating facts," and the judge agreed, and threw out the case:
US District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil agreed with Fox's premise, adding that the network "persuasively argues" that "given Mr. Carlson's reputation, any reasonable viewer 'arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism' about the statements he makes."
"This 'general tenor' of the show should then inform a viewer that he is not 'stating actual facts' about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in 'exaggeration' and 'non-literal commentary,'" the ruling said.
That didn't work for Fox News in the Dominion Voting Systems case, though, and I was kind of hoping it had gone away. Maybe traditional law only applies to corporations now.
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