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Someone Please Explain The Law Of Defamation To Giuliani*
As a first-year law student, Giuliani either missed the class in basic personal injury law (torts) or failed the course.
Giuliani claims his defamatory conduct had no connection to, and he was not responsible for, the clearly foreseeable harm suffered by the targets of his malicious, widely disseminated public invective. Unfortunately for Giuliani, the class he missed on defamation taught that recoverable damages include the exact kinds of foreseeable harm Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss suffered as a direct and proximate result of his slanderous publications: reputational harm.
A statement is defamatory if it calls into question a person’s honesty, integrity, virtue, or reputation and thereby exposes that person to public hatred, contempt, or ridicule in the eyes of the person to whom it is published or, if published to more than one person, to at least a substantial and respectable minority of its audience.
Factors a jury considers in determining and assessing damages for defamation include harm to reputation, impaired standing in the community, humiliation, shame, mental anguish and suffering, emotional distress and related physical injury, and other similar types of injuries.
Giuliani claimed Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea ArShay “Shaye” Moss “participated in a…