Rudy Giuliani filed for bankruptcy in New York on Thursday, court records show.
In the filing, the former New York City mayor listed nearly $152 million in debts, including legal fees and unpaid taxes. He listed his assets at between $1 million and $10 million.
The filing comes one day after Giuliani, Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, was ordered to immediately pay $148 million in damages to two election workers he defamed.
The election workers, Ruby Freeman and daughter Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, won a defamation suit against Giuliani earlier this year. The attorney had falsely claimed that Freeman and Moss tampered with election results in Georgia’s Fulton County, leading to racist harassment and threats against the two Black women. The election workers said they were sent threatening letters and voicemails, targeted on social media with racist and violent posts and even confronted in person.
“Most days I pray that God does not wake me up and I just disappear,” Moss recounted during the trial.
“I don’t have a name no more. The only thing you have in your life is your name … my life is messed up. My life is really messed up,” Freeman said in her testimony. “I was terrorized.”
Giuliani conceded in July that he had spread false statements about the two women. After Giuliani failed to hand over key documents in discovery, a federal judge issued a default judgment against him in August and found him liable for defamation.
A Washington, D.C., jury awarded Freeman and Moss the $148 million earlier this month: $33 million in damages for defamation, $40 million in damages for emotional distress and $75 million in punitive damages.
“The filing should be a surprise to no one,” Ted Goodman, an adviser to Giuliani, said in a statement. “No person could have reasonably believed that Mayor Rudy Giuliani would be able to pay such a high punitive amount. Chapter 11 will afford Mayor Giuliani the opportunity and time to pursue an appeal, while providing transparency for his finances under the supervision of the bankruptcy court, to ensure all creditors are treated equally and fairly throughout the process.”
Just days after being awarded the damages, Moss and Freeman filed another suit against Giuliani, accusing him of continuing to defame them even after being found liable for the false statements he made about them and their role in the 2020 election.
According to the new lawsuit, Giuliani “engaged in, and is engaging in, a continuing course of repetitive false speech and harassment ― specifically, repeating over and over the same lies that Plaintiffs engaged in election fraud during their service as election workers during the 2020 presidential election.”