Appeals court won’t let Rudy Giuliani out of Dominion executive’s defamation lawsuit

Rudy Giuliani’s legal woes continued to worsen this week. On the heels of his bankruptcy attorneys seeking to quit, a Colorado appeals court on Thursday handed down a significant victory to a former Dominion Voting Systems executive, allowing him to proceed with a defamation lawsuit against the former New York City mayor over baseless claims about rigging the 2020 election.

The ruling was issued by a three-judge panel on the Colorado Court of Appeals and the reasoning mirrored the court’s earlier decision to allow Eric Coomer to go forward with defamation suits against Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign and “Kraken” lawyer Sidney Powell, among others. Giuliani was among the defendants named in Coomer’s initial lawsuit but was granted a stay of appeal for himself because he was in the throes of bankruptcy proceedings in Manhattan.

Giuliani, during a Nov. 19, 2020, press conference on supposed election fraud, referred to Coomer as a “vicious, vicious man” who was “close to Antifa” and claimed Coomer “specifically [said] that they’re going to fix this election.”

In late December 2020, one month after the election and a matter of days before Jan. 6, Dr. Eric Coomer, formerly the director of product strategy and security for Dominion Voting Systems, filed a lawsuit in Denver County against Donald Trump’s campaign, two right-wing cable news networks, and a collection of Trump-allied election-deniers, claiming that the defendants conspired to defame him and intentionally inflicted “severe” emotional distress by falsely accusing him of being an “anonymous Antifa activist” hell-bent on ensuring the former president was “not going to win” the election.

Giuliani moved to have the case dismissed, claiming that Coomer could not show his statements were made with “actual malice” or knowing disregard for the truth. He also filed a declaration attesting that “he believed the statements he made at the press conference regarding Coomer were true.”

The panel reasoned that at this stage of the litigation, Coomer is not required to prove falsity and actual malice in Giuliani’s statements, he’s merely required to “show a reasonable probability that he will be able to meet his burden of proof by clear and convincing evidence at trial.” The court reasoned that Coomer had met that burden.

In analyzing the alleged falsity of Giuliani’s prior statements, the ruling emphasized that Coomer’s own declaration unambiguously refutes Giuliani’s claims.

“[Coomer] has shown a reasonable likelihood of proving by clear and convincing evidence that these statements were false,” the panel wrote. “Most importantly, in his declaration, Coomer attested that he (1) did not participate in the alleged conference call; (2) did not say he could rig the election; and (3) did not take any action to subvert the election. That declaration, if true, could itself provide clear and convincing evidence that Giuliani’s statements were false.”

In analyzing whether Giuliani’s claims could be construed as being made with “actual malice,” the panel reasoned that based on the evidence available at the time, “there is a reasonable likelihood that jury could find that Giuliani, at a minimum, entertained serious doubts as to its truth.”

The court also noted that Giuliani never advanced any theory as to how Coomer could have possibly rigged the election and that his allegedly defamatory claims were made after the government agency responsible for election security “had rejected any claim that the election had been compromised.”

Similar to the other defendants, the panel did dismiss Coomer’s conspiracy claim against Giuliani, finding that there was insufficient evidence that multiple parties agreed to make false statements about the former Dominion executive.

The panel remanded the case back to the district court to continue proceedings.

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