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Rudy Giuliani has reached a tentative settlement with two former election workers who won $148m (£120m) in damages after they successfully sued him for defamation over false election fraud claims.
In a letter to a New York judge, Giuliani’s lawyer said his client reached a deal with Wandrea “Shaye” Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, that would forgo the need for an upcoming trial to settle his debt.
The former lawyer for President-elect Donald Trump was set to appear in court on Thursday. The deal was announced after he did not show for several hours.
Giuliani wrote in a post on X that the agreement will let him to keep his New York and Florida homes and “all of my personal belongings”.
Ms Moss and Ms Freeman said in a statement that they had agreed to allow him to keep the belongings in exchange for “compensation and his promise not to ever defame us”.
“Today is a major milestone in our journey. We have reached an agreement and can now move forward with our lives,” the women said in a statement, calling the past four years “a living nightmare”.
The former New York City mayor, meanwhile, said the settlement did not involve an “admission of liability or wrongdoing”.
“No one deserves to be subjected to threats, harassment, or intimidation,” he added. “This whole episode was unfortunate. I and the Plaintiffs have agreed not to ever talk about each other in any defamatory manner, and I urge others to do the same.”
Neither Giuiliani nor the women disclosed the details of the settlement agreement.
The 80-year-old had been ordered to turn over a host of belongings to pay off the $148m he owed Ms Moss and Ms Freeman. The items included over a dozen luxury watches, a Mercedes Benz car once owned by movie star Lauren Bacall, his $6m Manhattan apartment and an autographed Joe DiMaggio baseball jersey.
The trial on Thursday was to decide whether Trump’s former attorney also needed to hand over the keys to his West Palm Beach, Florida, condo as well as his collection of New York Yankees World Series rings that he said he had given to his son.
Giuliani had filed for bankruptcy shortly after he was ordered to pay the former election workers, but the bankruptcy case was dismissed, leaving him without protection from creditors.
Giuliani had fought efforts to collect several of the belongings he owed the women, claiming he did not know where some of them were.
He was held in contempt of court twice last week, first for not complying with requests to provide information about his assets, and a second time for making repeated defamatory statements about Ms Moss and Ms Freeman.
A federal judge warned Giuliani that he could face jail time if he did not stop making false claims about them.
Giuliani was one of several Trump allies who peddled the false claims of fraud as a part of efforts to overturn Trump’s loss to President Joe Biden. He has claimed the women – who served as poll workers in the 2020 election – committed ballot fraud.
His false statements led to death threats and harassment for Ms Moss and Ms Freeman, who testified before a US House of Representatives committee investigating the 6 January Capitol attack. The two said they had been forced into hiding because of the threats, some of them racist.
Giuliani, a Republican, was first elected mayor of New York City in 1993 and was in charge at the time of the 11 September attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. In 2008 he ran for president, and later became a Trump advisor.
Giuliani is still facing charges in Georgia over his attempts to overturn Trump’s election loss, though that case has remained in limbo since Fulton Country District Attorney Fani Willis was taken off.
