`We are more than conquerors'
WASHINGTON >> Michael J. Gottlieb can never remember the exact amount — it's $148,169,000 — that a jury ordered Rudy Giuliani to pay the Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. But Freeman's words after the December 2023 victory are indelible to him.
“Don't waste your time being angry at those who did this to me and my daughter,” said Freeman, 65, who with her daughter Moss, 39, was falsely accused by Giuliani of aiding an imagined plot to steal the 2020 presidential election.
Less than a decade ago, the two women would have struggled to find a lawyer. But Gottlieb, a partner at the firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher and a former associate counsel in the Obama White House, represented them for free. Convinced that viral lies threaten public discourse and democracy, he is at the forefront of a small but growing cadre of lawyers deploying defamation, one of the oldest areas of the law, as a weapon against a tide of political disinformation.
Gottlieb has also represented the owner of the Washington pizzeria targeted by “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorists as well as the brother of Seth Rich, a young Democratic National Committee staff member whose 2016 murder ignited bogus theories implicating his family. In the Giuliani case, Gottlieb, his law partner Meryl Governski and other members of his team worked with Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan group that pushes for laws and policies to counter what it sees as authoritarian threats.
Before the Trump era and the explosion of social
Shaye Moss, center, being comforted by her mother, Ruby Freeman, testifies at a House committee hearing in Washington in June 2022. Rudolph W. Giuliani was ordered to pay them both $148million late last year. A law firm assisted them in their case.
media, though, such cases were virtually nonexistent.
“The new information landscape we're in is a little bit like the Wild West — a lawless space,” said Ian Bassin, a co-founder of Protect Democracy. Lawyers, he said, have turned to defamation, which is legally defined as any false information, either published, broadcast or spoken, that harms the reputation of a person, business or organization. “It's one of the most effective and only strategies for dealing with these outand-out falsehoods,” Bassin said.
In the past few years, more than a dozen highprofile defamation cases have made their way through the courts. A majority have been brought against defendants on the right, but the right brings lawsuits, too, often against media organizations.
In 2020 and 2021, The Washington Post, CNN and NBC settled a defamation case brought by Nick Sandmann, a Kentucky high school student, who said the outlets had wrongly described his encounter with a Native American elder as a racially tinged confrontation. Sandmann's
suit against other outlets, including The New York Times, ended last week when the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
Payouts have been particularly large for defamation cases against the right. In January, lawyer Roberta Kaplan defeated former President Donald Trump in court when a jury ordered him to pay $83 million for defaming her client, E. Jean Carroll, after he was found to have sexually abused her. Last year, lawyers from the firm Susman Godfrey secured a $787.5 million settlement for Dominion Voting Systems from Fox News, one of the biggest ever in a defamation case, after Fox aired bogus theories falsely linking the company to election fraud. In late 2022, Sandy Hook families defamed by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones won a total of nearly $1.5 billion from juries in Texas and Connecticut, though Jones has yet to pay them anything.
In other cases, the people harmed, like Freeman and Moss, cannot afford lawyers or struggle to find firms willing to pursue defendants unable or resistant to paying big damages, like Giuliani. Gottlieb has tried
to fill that gap.
“The cost of bringing a defamation suit to trial can be enormous, often exceeding a quarter-million dollars' worth of expenses, to say nothing of the value of attorney time,” said Mark Bankston, a lawyer for some of the Sandy Hook families defamed by Jones.
Gottlieb and his team refer to their cases as a “hobby” in service to those whose lives and reputations have been damaged by people with power and large online followings.
Gottlieb's day job is filled with the powerful client list more typical of big Washington law firms. He has represented Venezuela's Citgo petroleum company; helped billionaire Steven A. Cohen beat a potential lifetime ban on managing client money after accusations of insider trading at Cohen's former hedge fund; and worked with President Joe Biden's son Hunter on behalf of a Romanian real estate tycoon whose sevenyear prison sentence for corruption was later vacated by a Romanian court.
“I understand there are definitely people who would say, `Wait a minute — litigation for Citgo is not the same as the litigation you're doing for Ruby and Shaye,'” he said. “I feel fortunate to have had a career where I've had a wide variety of cases and have a practice that works different skill sets and different parts of my brain. However people want to think about it and look at it is sort of fine.”
Post-truth world
Gottlieb, who was a clerk for Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and served on an Obama administration anti-corruption task force in Afghanistan, had his first foray into the post-truth world in 2016. That was when Jones and his Infowars outlet spread the lie that Hillary Clinton and Democratic Party operatives were running a child sex trafficking ring out of Comet Ping Pong, a Washington pizzeria owned by James Alefantis.
In December of that year, a man who had been bingeing on Infowars “Pizzagate” episodes fired a rifle inside the restaurant. No one was injured, but the gunman's trip to Washington to avenge an imagined crime foreshadowed a series of violent attacks by conspiracy theorists, including the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.
Jones insisted that the First Amendment protected the lies he had broadcast, like most defendants in these cases. But threatened with a lawsuit, he made an on-air retraction and removed all Pizzagate content from Infowars' website and social media channels. The full settlement remains confidential.
Soon after the Pizzagate case, Gottlieb represented Aaron Rich, whose brother Seth Rich, 27, worked for the Democratic National Committee and was gunned down in a botched robbery in 2016. The case remains unsolved, and wild theories that Seth Rich was killed by Democrats spread from online fever swamps to Fox News. Aaron Rich and his parents were implicated in the plots, doxxed and harassed.
“If this had happened to me or my brother or sister, and somebody was doing this to my parents, I would go ballistic,” Gottlieb said. “And no one was helping them.”
In 2018, Gottlieb and Aaron Rich sued The Washington Times as well as an internet provocateur, Matt Couch, and a businessperson, Ed Butowsky, for spreading falsehoods that the two brothers had sold DNC documents in a plot that resulted in Seth Rich's murder. Aaron Rich eventually received a confidential settlement that included a retraction of the falsehoods spread by both men and the newspaper, as well as an apology to the Rich family. Rich's parents retained Susman Godfrey and sued Fox News. They obtained a confidential cash settlement, but no apology.
The Georgia case
Less than two months later, Gottlieb and his team were writing the complaint in Ruby Freeman, et al., v. Rudolph Giuliani.
In his frenzied public scramble to make his case that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, Giuliani, the former president's lawyer, had spread the false story that Freeman and her daughter Moss had colluded to falsify results while counting ballots in Georgia. He falsely claimed that a video showing Freeman handing a small item to her daughter — a ginger mint — was the two women exchanging USB thumb drives “as if they're vials of heroin and cocaine.”
Trump echoed the bogus allegations. In an infamous taped phone call with Georgia election officials, Trump named Freeman again and again, calling her a “professional vote scammer” and “hustler.”
Threats poured in to the two women. People called them traitors and, using racial slurs, demanded they be lynched or shot.