Rudy Giuliani’s Coffee Company Comes Under Scrutiny

Two election workers can go after Rudy Giuliani’s coffee profits because the company involved is the former Donald Trump lawyer’s “alter ego,” a legal expert has said.

New York federal judge Lewis Liman on Thursday sharply criticized Giuliani’s attempts to use company law to stop Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, from freezing funds held by Giuliani Communications.

It was while acting as Trump’s attorney during the 2020 election that the former New York mayor wrongly claimed that Freeman and Moss could be seen on CCTV adding ballots for Joe Biden at an Atlanta count center. They sued for defamation, then a Washington, D.C., jury awarded them $148 million in December 2023, and they are now seeking to claim that money from Giuliani.

Giuliani Communications holds the profits to Giuliani’s coffee company, Rudy Coffee. The company wasn’t sued by Freeman and Moss and has no relation to the 2020 election.

Although company law normally protects a limited liability company from unrelated lawsuits involving one of its executives, there are exceptions.

“Rudy Giuliani’s case demonstrates an exception to the rule,” according to Eric Chaffee, a business law professor at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. “Rudy Giuliani organized Giuliani Communications, LLC to receive his profits from Ruby Coffee. The judge in his case has held that the company is the mere ‘alter ego’ of Giuliani based on how it functions.”

Giuliani’s image and name is on each coffee package and he has recorded online adverts for it.

“When a company is the mere alter ego of an individual, a court will view the assets of the company as belonging to the individual. That is what is occurring in Giuliani’s case,” Chaffee said. “While piercing the veil of a limited liability company is a rarity, it does occur. Courts will most commonly do it in instances in which there is little separation between an individual and the entity, and the court views the company as being used to shield assets, rather than to conduct business.”

As first reported in Newsweek, Giuliani Communications receives its coffee profits through Parkside Financial Bank and Trust in St Louis, Missouri.

Liman wrote that Giuliani had put forward an “unpersuasive” argument that Parkside was exempt from the case and that its assets should not be restrained by the court.

“He asserts, in effect, that the assets being restrained are not those in which he has an interest and therefore should not be used to satisfy the judgment,” Liman wrote.

“But Plaintiffs’ restraining notice does not seek to have Parkside turn over the relevant funds to Plaintiffs or to have the Court or Parkside determine the ownership of those funds.”

Quoting from the law book, New York Practice, he said that what the plaintiffs are seeking is “a kind of freeze on such of the debtor’s assets as the served person may have…It buys time, in other words,” he wrote.

Newsweek sought comment from the attorney of Freeman and Moss on Monday.