Left: Hillary Clinton attended a Clinton Global Initiative meeting on Sept. 20, 2022 in New York City (Photo by Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for Clinton Global Initiative). Right:
A woman who claims Rudy Giuliani harassed, sexually assaulted her, and subjected her to a hostile work environment while she was an employee, only to fire her and “never pay[] her for the work she performed,” finally returned to court after lengthy delays in the case, as a judge heard arguments Wednesday over whether various allegations could stay in her complaint. After the hearing got off to a rocky start, either due to technical issues with the call participants or because Giuliani was “confused” if he was representing himself, the judge did hand down a series of rulings to strike parts of Noelle Dunphy’s lawsuit.
In mid-July, after a federal judge ordered that Giuliani’s bankruptcy case should be dismissed, it seemed that Dunphy would be able to resume her lawsuit for the first time since January — even as the suit remains in the preliminary stages one year after it was filed in New York state court.
As it turned out, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Sean Lane did not officially toss the bankruptcy case until August, largely due to a lingering fight over the hundreds of thousands Giuliani owed in fees and a lack of transparency about his finances. This dispute called into question whether an automatic stay of Dunphy’s lawsuit had actually been lifted, leading to further delay, until now.
Giuliani had racked up more than $300,000 in fees because his creditors — defamed Georgia 2020 election worker Shaye Moss, Dominion Voting Systems, and Dunphy — hired Global Data Risk to investigate his assets over the course of the Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Now, as Giuliani faced a deadline to turn over to Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman his “cash accounts, jewelry and valuables, a legal claim for unpaid attorneys’ fees” — even his multi-million dollar Manhattan apartment — the former NYC mayor made an appearance by phone in New York Supreme Court Justice Nicholas Moyne’s courtroom.
After attorney Justin Kelton entered an appearance for Dunphy and Adam Katz for the Giuliani corporate defendants in the case, Giuliani coughed, confirmed he could hear Moyne, and said he was representing himself.
“You are in fact representing yourself?” Moyne asked. “Is that correct?”
Giuliani then said that was his belief, but that he needed to check.
“Can I talk to Mr. Katz about it? I am confused, you are correct, your honor,” Giuliani said. “I am confused.”
Nearly two hours later, when the judge again said that Giuliani is proceeding pro se, Giuliani responded that he would prefer that Katz represent him. The judge directed the two to talk about that offline, and a short time later there were courtroom fireworks.
But back to where things began: Moyne said that he did “intend on making rulings today,” and he did so.
What the arguments were about
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 the time period of 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, including allegations that Giuliani “made comments about ‘freakin Arabs’ and Jews,” “demeaned and sexualized” prominent female politicians — like Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Margaret Thatcher — and made a “series of derogatory remarks about the LGBTQ community,” allegedly saying that Mike Bloomberg “became gay” after his wife left him, using a slur to describe actor Matt Damon, and adding that Elizabeth Warren “does not look like a babe” unlike Pocahontas.
In the judge’s view, whether certain aspects of the details in paragraphs 235 and 237 should be stricken from the complaint depended on if it could be shown the allegations were “unnecessarily inserted into a pleading” and were irrelevant.
Katz took the position of “when in doubt leave it out,” calling the details “irrelevant” but also “inadmissible.” He also added in a denial that Dunphy was an employee of Giuliani’s.
Kelton agreed with the judge’s framing of the issue and said it “basically boils down to relevance and what may be admissible at trial.”
“If certain allegations end up being stricken from the complaint, that does not automatically preclude their admissibility into evidence later on at trial,” Moyne noted for clarity. “In other words, striking of allegations […] does not necessarily foreclose” issues from being raised later at the trial.
Katz said that the Giuliani remarks were “comments made in jest” and that there’s “limited probative value to including this type of information,” since Dunphy isn’t Black, Jewish, gay, or of Arab descent.
“This broad inclusion of comments made about everyone under the sun is just really meant to taint the jury and to inflame,” he said.
As for comments about Clinton, Thatcher, Bloomberg and Pelosi? These comments have nothing to do with a “hostile work environment,” Katz said.
Kelton, speaking generally, countered that the derogatory remarks in the context of an employment relationship is relevant to harassment and hostile work environment claims even if Dunphy doesn’t fall into the protected classes those comments were about.
When the judge asked what Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi’s bodies had to do with the lawsuit, Kelton said that it showed Giuliani mocked women’s appearances, that he talked about them in a sexualized way, and that he “had a pattern of hostility against women,” like Dunphy.
“The names are included for specificity,” Kelton added. “He doesn’t get special protection because he was talking about women who were very well known.”
“Nancy Pelosi was not working with Mr. Giuliani, I think we can all agree with that,” the judge quipped.
In the end, Moyne decided that mention of other politicians or Matt Damon by name should be stricken from paragraph 235 of the complaint, but he kept in all of the remarks Giuliani allegedly made about Dunphy.
The judge also struck the line about “‘freakin Arabs’ and Jews.”
“It’s highly inflammatory right now,” Moyne said, seemingly referring to the Israel-Hamas war.
From here, the judge struck a detail from paragraph 237 about Giuliani’s alleged “fear of the FBI” and began discussing a well-known scene from “Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm,” where Giuliani was on a bed on his back and “pulled down his pants,” the complaint said (Giuliani reacted to the scene by saying he was tucking in his shirt).
Moyne asked Kelton why the mention of the Borat film, specifically the inclusion of the screenshot in the complaint, was relevant.
“What would you do with that?” the judge asked.
To Dunphy, the scene was “very, very, very similar to what she experienced,” Kelton replied. “As close as an illustration as possible.”
After Katz insisted that picture definitely “has to go,” the judge wondered if he himself had ever seen the movie and then struck the photo from the complaint. In addition, Moyne struck allegations of presidential pardon selling.
Later on during the hearing, the judge allowed Giuliani to speak but warned the former NYC mayor not to launch into a soliloquy or personal attacks. After Giuliani said he had five points to make, he again accused Dunphy of “being a professional plaintiff in court to extort men” through surreptitious recordings and said the lawsuit “should be dismissed based on injustice.”
“My reputation has been ruined,” shouted Giuliani, a disbarred Donald Trump-allied attorney of renown facing criminal charges in Arizona and Georgia and staggering civil liabilities for defamation.
After the judge threatened “I’m going to cut you off” and Kelton said “Your honor, this is outrageous,” Moyne stated: “Mr. Giuliani, I’m muting you.”
“You can’t do this,” the judge said. “You should probably strongly consider — not probably — you should strongly consider” finding new counsel.
“This is about essential fairness,” Giuliani replied.
“They’re inappropriate,” Moyne said of the remarks. “They’re going to cause prejudice.”
“I’m going to protect you from yourself,” the judge continued. “These are not legal arguments you’re making right now.”
Moyne added that he wouldn’t allow Giuliani to go on.
“You have to follow my rules,” the judge said.
The second part of the hearing that preceded this exchange focused on Dunphy’s argument that sanctions should be imposed on the defendants 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.”
On Wednesday, Kelton said it was “absolutely untrue” that Dunphy was sanctioned in another case by U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman and that this was not “in any way open to interpretation,” since there was “no finding of fact, no finding of law.”
“I know this is being fought over […] because the supposed circumstances that led up to this controversy with Judge Furman involved recordings,” Moyne responded, addressing the defendants. “I’m not gonna sanction you or your client about this Furman business. I find it a complete sideshow.”
What really needs to happen, the judge said, is for the defendants to answer Dunphy’s complaint since the case is still close to the starting point nearly two years later.
“The time has come for that,” Moyne said.
Have a tip we should know? [email protected]
