Giuliani defamation trial: Jury awards election workers nearly $150 million

Shaye Moss is expected to take the witness stand this morning on the second day of her defamation damages trial against Rudy Giuliani.

At the trial's first day yesterday, an attorney for Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, described how Moss "started to have nightmares" as hundreds of strangers flooded her phone and social media with threats of violence and racist remarks -- including "nightmares of her son finding her hanging from a tree alongside her mom."

Moss "will explain the humiliation she felt" trying to apply for another job at a Chick-fil-A restaurant, the attorney added, where her interviewer found an article about scrutiny of Moss after the election and asked her, "Is this you?"

A day after Giuliani was slammed by plaintiffs' attorneys for remarks he made to the press following yesterday's proceedings, the former mayor ignored questions from reporters as he made his way into the courtroom this morning.

In a filing late Monday, attorneys for Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss are accusing Rudy Giuliani and his attorney of crafting arguments at trial that run afoul of the court's prior ruling that Giuliani's defamatory statements about the mother and daughter were false.

The filing cites ABC News' reporting on correspondent Terry Moran's exchange with Giuliani as the former mayor departed court, during which Giuliani said that he "told the truth" about Freeman and Moss "changing votes," and that he should not be held accountable for the conduct of "other people overreacting."

"According to public news reports, upon leaving the courthouse, Defendant Giuliani stopped to say to an assembled group of the press: 'When I testify, the whole story will be definitively clear that what I said was true, and that, whatever happened to them -- which is unfortunate about other people overreacting -- everything I said about them is true,'" the filing says, quoting ABC News' report.

"Needless to say," attorneys for Freeman and Moss write, "were Defendant Giuliani to testify in a manner remotely resembling those comments, he would be in plain violation of the Court's prior orders in this case conclusively affirming, and reaffirming, that all elements of liability have been established, including that Defendant Giuliani's defamatory statements were false."

Judge Howell in August awarded a default judgment to the plaintiffs, leaving the current trial to determine the amount of damages and any penalties Giuliani will have to pay. In their late Monday filing, the plaintiffs' attorneys urged Howell to "instruct counsel for Defendant Giuliani that he has violated and is prohibited from further violating the Court's orders by making arguments contrary to its prior evidentiary rulings."

Departing court after the first day of the trial, Rudy Giuliani told ABC News' Terry Moran that he has no regrets about his treatment of Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss -- and he doubled down on his core allegations about them.

"When I testify, the whole story will be definitively clear that what I said was true, and that, whatever happened to them -- which is unfortunate about other people overreacting -- everything I said about them is true," Giuliani told reporters.

"Do you regret what you did to Ruby and Shaye?" Moran asked.

"Of course I don't regret it," Giuliani said. "I told the truth. They were engaged in changing votes."

"There's no proof of that," Moran responded.

"You're damn right there is," Giuliani retorted. "Stay tuned."

Court will resume Tuesday at 9 a.m. ET.

Plaintiffs' first witness in the case is a social media monitor who testified about the deluge of "racist and graphic material" targeting Freeman and Moss that appeared online after Giuliani began accusing them by name.

Regina Scott, a retired Chicago Police Department official who now works as a security and risk analyst, testified that negative mentions about Freeman and Moss surfaced online at a prodigious rate.

A report Scott prepared identified more than 710,000 mentions of Freeman and Moss between November 2020 and May 2023, and 320,000 mentions between Aug. 18, 2023, and Nov. 11, 2023.

"The type of violent and racist and graphic material, that's on a level we don't see at all in our work," Scott said.

-ABC News' Laura Romero