Jan 27, 2024 - 08:07
By huffpost.com

'Yikes': Critics Clown Rudy Giuliani For Doing Trump No 'Favors' In Ridiculous Defense

Rudy Giuliani defended Donald Trump with wild on-air remarks after a jury ordered his former client to pay $83.3 million in damages to writer E. Jean Carroll on Friday.

Trump’s former personal attorney, in an interview with Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt, declared that the legal system has “gone to hell” before calling U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who oversaw the defamation trial, a “pure disgrace.”

Kaplan oversaw a separate trial last year where a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll, who has maintained that the former president raped her in the 1990s, and awarded her $5 million in damages.

“First of all, he was found not guilty – or not liable for rape. It was sexual assault, not rape. And second, you can be – you can be guilty of rape and still, a person can be a wacko. That was a defamation,” said Giuliani, who was ordered to pay $148 million to a pair of Georgia election workers he defamed after the 2020 election.

“You’re allowed to still defend yourself against defamation.”

A jury previously found that Trump was not liable for rape although Kaplan has written that this doesn’t mean that Carroll “failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”

Kaplan said the jury’s decision stems from the “narrow, technical” meaning of rape in New York penal law, the Associated Press noted. He wrote that the rape claim was “substantially true under common modern parlance.”

Critics on social media mocked the defense from Trump’s former personal attorney, noting that he’s someone who “can’t tell the difference between a hotel and a garden center.”