What you need to know about Giuliani’s ‘star witness’ Melissa Carone who’s been compared an SNL character

By now, you’ve probably seen Rudy Giuliani’s ‘star witness’ Melissa Carone embark on a bizarre rant while appearing in court.

A video of Carone making outlandish claims about US electoral proceedings was watched more than 20M times on Twitter.

In it, Carone tells Michigan state representative Steve Johnson:

“The poll book is completely off. Completely off. I’d say that poll book is off by 100,000. That poll book? Why don’t you look at the registered voters on there? How many registered voters are on there? Do you even know the answer to that? Zero! Zero, there’s zero.”

Carone then continues with her tirade even in spite of attempted intervention by Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer.

Her brash persona and unsubstantiated claims caught people’s attention and inspired jokes.

But who is she, and what was actually going on?

First of all, Giuliani has been attempting to prove that the 2020 election was rigged against Trump in a series of court cases, but it isn’t going particularly well. A series of gaffes like this one, as well as his unfortunate hair dye incident and possible farting, have hit the headlines – as cases were thrown out in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia.

Most recently, Giuliani attended a two-day hearing in Michigan, during which he called on Carone.

Carone claims she is a whistle-blower who witnessed numerous instances of voter fraud while working for Dominion Voting Systems. The point she was trying to get across in her viral clip was that voter turnout was abnormally high and that over 100,000 votes were fabricated in Michigan – something which Republican lawmaker Johnson says is “not the case”.

Rather than presenting evidence for these claims, she drew on numerous conspiracy theories that have been floating around since the election: that the votes of deceased people and illegal immigrants were counted and that the results were tampered with (“what did you guys do [to the poll book], take it and do something crazy with it?”).

Elsewhere during the hearing, she claimed that “everything that happened” at the voting centre she worked at was “fraud” and that the same ballots were deliberately counted multiple times.

Asked why her claims weren’t backed up by other witnesses, she said it was because they’d been “threatened” and that she had personally had to move house and “get rid of social media”.

At least one of these statements has been debunked, because Carone’s Facebook page was still visible after the hearing.

Earlier this month, Carone’s story was called “simply not credible” by a Michigan judge, but that didn’t stop Trump’s team from calling on her as a witness.

This was the messy result.