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(Reuters) – A US voting machine company has filed a $ 1.3 billion lawsuit against former President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, charging him with defamation in what it called his “big lie” campaign about widespread fraud in the presidential elections, court documents showed Monday.
Denver-based company Dominion Voting Systems Inc filed an earlier lawsuit against Trump’s campaign attorney Sidney Powell, whom the company also accused of spreading false conspiracy theories about the election that Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden. .
A senior Dominion employee, Eric Coomer, also filed a defamation lawsuit against the Trump campaign, saying he had been forced into hiding due to death threats from Trump supporters.
Giuliani and his attorney, Robert Costello, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Giuliani has defended his claims about the elections, saying during a radio show last week that he is under attack for “exercising my right to freedom of expression and defending my client.”
Trump and his allies spent two months denying their electoral defeat and claiming without evidence that it was the result of widespread electoral fraud, before their supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6.
Dominion seeks $ 1.3 billion in damages from the former New York City mayor, alleging in the lawsuit that “he and his allies fabricated and spread the ‘Big Lie,’ which predictably went viral and misled millions into believing that Dominion had stolen votes from them and fixes the election. “
Dominion said he filed the lawsuit “to clear things up” and “to defend himself, his employees and the electoral process.”
Last week, a group of prominent lawyers asked the New York judiciary to suspend Giuliani’s legal license for making false claims in post-election trials and for urging Trump supporters to participate in a “trial by combat. “shortly before storming the United States Capitol on January 6. .
Dominion states in its lawsuit that it has spent $ 565,000 on private security to protect its employees, who face harassment and death threats.
“Giuliani’s statements,” the lawsuit says, “were calculated for, and in fact, sparked outrage and caused enormous damage to Dominion.
Founded in 2002, Dominion is a major American manufacturer of voting machines, and several Dominion machines were used in more than two dozen states during the 2020 elections.
(Reporting by Susan Heavey in Washington and Jan Wolfe in Boston; Edited by Lisa Lambert and Chizu Nomiyama)
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