Rudy Giuliani admitted to the court in his defamation trial, where he had accused election workers of changing votes, that "he made the alleged statements and they they were per se defamatory". He then went on to repeat those statements and claim that they were true.
Is he contradicting statements he made to the court? Or in US law (or whichever state the trial took place in) can a statement be both defamatory and true?
Defamatory means harmful to someone's reputation. Defamatory per se, in this context, means that statements of the kind he made are presumed to be harmful to someone's reputation even without evidence offered in court that this is the case.
Historically, truth was an affirmative defense to a cause of action for defamation, although a legal cause of action for defamation in some circumstances requires proof of falsity.
Giuliani was an utter idiot for repeating those statements and claiming that they were true, because he had already been held liable for making the statements as a matter of law and was only attending a hearing on damages at the time. His refusal to back down in court once he had already lost, no doubt, contributed to the jury's decision to award damages of $150 million against him following that hearing.
