A photo of Rudy Giuliani and Noelle Dunphy from 2019 (used with permission).
Now that a judge has thrown out Rudy Giuliani’s bankruptcy case, pending lawsuits can continue, and on Monday, an attorney for a woman accusing “America’s Mayor” of sexual assault, harassment, and wage theft in the course of her employment asked a judge to jump-start the long dormant case.
Noelle Dunphy’s attorney Justin Kelton, in a Monday letter to New York Supreme Court Justice Nicholas Moyne, noted that U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Sean Lane tossed out Giuliani’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy case on Friday and that, as a result, the plaintiff is asking the state judge to hear arguments on pending motions as soon as possible.
“Accordingly, we respectfully request that the Court place this matter back on the active calendar, and schedule oral argument on the parties’ outstanding motions,” the letter said. “Given the significant delay occasioned by Mr. Giuliani’s bankruptcy, we request that the argument take place at the Court’s earliest convenient date.”
The docket in the case shows no other activity since early January, when a notice said that the lawsuit was automatically stayed given Giuliani’s bankruptcy filing. There are dueling sanctions-related motions that remain unresolved.
Lawyers for Giuliani and his companies previously moved to strike Dunphy’s complaint “in its entirety” as a sanction, or at least to strike “unnecessary, inflammatory, scandalous, and unduly prejudicial allegations” from the graphic suit.
A summary of the allegations Giuliani moved to strike.
While Giuliani has denied the assault allegations, denied that Dunphy was an employee, and said the two had been in a consensual dating relationship, Dunphy has said she was Giuliani’s off-the-books director of business development and, during that time period (2019 to 2021), he allegedly made unwanted “sexual demands,” groped her, raped her, ultimately did not pay her what she was owed after firing her, and “went on alcohol-drenched rants that included sexist, racist, and antisemitic remarks, which made the work environment unbearable.”
“Many of these comments were recorded,” the suit added.
Dunphy’s lawyers, for their part, previously asked for sanctions against Giuliani and his companies for “frivolous conduct,” namely “making false statements about Giuliani’s misconduct toward Ms. Dunphy as alleged in her Complaint” and “falsely claiming that Ms. Dunphy was sanctioned in a prior action.”
“Their papers are replete with provably false assertions that Giuliani never said and did the things Ms. Dunphy alleges, along with the spurious and inflammatory claim that Ms. Dunphy was previously sanctioned in a different litigation (she was not),” a memorandum from August 2023 said. “These lies were conceived with a malicious intent to harass Ms. Dunphy to the point of dissuading her from pursuing her legal rights in this action.”
Lane’s bankruptcy dismissal ruling said that Giuliani faces “at least nine outstanding lawsuits” and that the plaintiffs in the civil cases “have a right to a jury trial, making these cases better resolved outside the bankruptcy forum.”
“As those parties receive their day in court—to which they are entitled—this Chapter 11 case would remain pending with all creditors left waiting,” Lane explained.
Dunphy was represented by attorneys for the Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors in the bankruptcy proceeding.
Giuliani is currently in Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention, where former President Donald Trump will be nominated mere days after surviving an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania.
Mayor @RudyGiuliani greets law enforcement in Milwaukee ahead of RNC pic.twitter.com/U6vbySsa9I
— CaitlinSinclairTV (@CSinclairtv) July 15, 2024
Law&Crime reached out to a Giuliani spokesman for comment.
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