Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss Score Some Justice

Wandrea "Shaye" Moss, left, is comforted by her mother, Ruby Freeman, at a January 6 Committee hearing. Photo by Jacquelyn Martin / AP

They were two innocent election workers, dutifully counting ballots in Atlanta for the 2020 presidential election. But the Trump campaign, and in particular Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani, turned them into targets. Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss endured years of false and baseless accusations from the Trump campaign, including that they had brought a suitcase filled with fake ballots to the counting center. Giuliani even used a racist dog whistle to publicly compare them to drug users. From there, the MAGA mob was unleashed. It attacked Freeman and Moss with such a torrent of threats of violence that they had to flee their homes.

Their story is a stark reminder of the human costs of dangerous, fraudulent claims. Freeman and Moss never asked for this kind of national attention, and they certainly didn’t deserve to have their lives ruined just for doing their jobs.

On Wednesday, there was a big and positive legal development for Freeman and Moss that will have profound consequences for Giuliani personally and could ripple across the ongoing federal and state criminal investigations. Let’s take a look at what unfolded, then go back and retell their story. It’s an important one for all of us to remember and honor, and one that could factor heavily into upcoming grand jury indictments.

The Giuliani concession

Once the dust settled a bit over the 2020 election, the furor over the Big Lie, and the ensuing insurrection at the Capitol, Freeman and Moss sought justice. Specifically, they sued Giuliani, and others such as the One America News Network and some of its top officers, in federal court in D.C. for defamation over their false, public statements about them. OAN earlier settled the case for an undisclosed amount, but the case proceeded against Giuliani. In the litigation, Giuliani in typical form had been foot dragging and facing sanctions for having failed to turn over discovery demanded by the plaintiffs. 

In a bid to head off those sanctions, and to “avoid unnecessary expenses in litigating what he believes to be unnecessary disputes,” Giuliani filed papers on Wednesday stipulating that he does not dispute that the statements he made about Freeman and Moss were “defamatory per se” and “false.”

That is a very big concession.

Giuliani claims, however, to still have valid defenses, including that his statements were protected under the First Amendment. But honestly, that defense isn’t likely to fly, given that nothing in the right of free speech allows you to defame private citizens, no matter how powerful you are. But that’s where Giuliani and his attorneys have landed.

Giuliani is seeking to limit the damage from these admissions by qualifying, in the stipulation, that his concessions were “solely for purposes of this litigation.” But prosecutors, and soon a jury in Atlanta, will understand this for what it is: Giuliani has now admitted—or at least is unable substantially to contest—that he made false and defamatory statements about two innocent Georgia poll workers in order to spread bogus conspiracies about the election, all in an effort to overturn the results. That’s a crime in Georgia, and as I discussed earlier, likely a Section 242 federal violation of civil rights.

Prosecutors will be able to play tapes of Giuliani making these false and defamatory statements, and then follow that up with his public filing in which he states he does not contest that they were false. His lawyers may object, but this is all likely to come into evidence, even if, as expected, Giuliani doesn’t take the stand.

The admission matters a great deal to the larger question of the co-conspirators’ criminal intent. For example, Fani Willis’s office is likely to file charges against Giuliani and Trump for criminal conspiracy to commit election fraud. Key to that will be proof that the co-conspirators knowingly spread false claims of ballot rigging to try to convince Georgia officials to overturn the election. 

Similarly, Jack Smith’s grand jury is likely to indict Trump and possibly his co-conspirators on charges of conspiracy to defraud and conspiracy against civil rights. Key to those charges will be the defendants’ states of mind while participating in the conspiracy. For example, did Trump and Giuliani intend to commit fraud by spreading election claims they knew or should have known to be false? And with respect to Freeman and Moss, did they intend to violate their civil rights by knowingly repeating false accusations to whip up the MAGA mob against them?

Giuliani was in on every meeting with Trump and moved lock-step with him on the false election claims, including those specifically about Freeman and Moss. If Giuliani has now essentially admitted that the statements he made about them were false and defamatory, there is a direct line to Trump as a participant in the very conspiracy built upon those and other lies.

A suitcase and a ginger mint

So how did two election poll workers come to find themselves in the center of a national maelstrom around the election? To understand this, we need to go back to Election Night 2020, specifically at the State Farm Arena where votes for Fulton County, Georgia were being tabulated. As the vote count grew close in Georgia, false claims, buttressed by a selectively edited video tape, began to circulate about the election results, and Giuliani gleefully amplified them.

Specifically, Giuliani promoted the false claim that Freeman and Moss had pulled a suitcase containing thousands of fraudulent ballots out from under a table. In fact, the “suitcase” was a ballot box holding as yet uncounted, real ballots, which the poll workers had placed beneath the table at the end of their shift to be counted the following day. The full video shows them putting the box under the table and pulling it out later, while the edited video just shows them retrieving it from under the table without that earlier context.

Georgia election officials immediately debunked the claim, as did the Justice Department and several journalists. But that didn’t stop Giuliani. He appeared in a hearing before Georgia state legislators and smeared Freeman and Moss publicly. “They should have been questioned already. Their places of work, their homes should have been searched,” Giuliani said to the lawmakers.

At one point, Giuliani, deplorably playing a racist card, said that Freeman and Moss were “passing around USB ports like they were vials of heroin or cocaine.” The January 6 Committee later determined that the “USB port” was actually a ginger mint.

Trump himself attacked Moss 18 times in his infamous call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, during which Trump also falsely called Freeman a “professional vote scammer” and a “hustler.” 

Trump’s and Giuliani’s smear campaigns and racist dog whistles against the two Black poll workers resulted, predictably, in direct threats from MAGA supporters of the ex-president. As reported by NPR:

Calls came in to Moss's old phone, which her son was using.

“He will answer it, and they’ll just call him all kinds of racial slurs, and saying what they’re going to do to him,” Moss said.

A stranger knocked on the door at Moss’s grandmother’s, where Moss used to live, and said they were there to make a citizens’ arrest. Moss’s grandma called her, frantic.

“She was just yelling on the phone, like ‘No! Stop! You cannot come in here! Stop!’ So, I just had to call the police, and this happens all the time,” Moss said.

Strangers also appeared at the home of Ruby Freeman, Moss's mother. Pizza deliveries showed up that Freeman hadn't ordered, and she told police she received at least 420 emails and 75 text messages, including one that read: “We know where you live, we coming to get you.”

Creepy mystery visits and an overt threat

There’s an unsolved mystery related to this story, one that District Attorney Fani Willis has looked into but about which we don’t have much further information. 

Per reporting by the New York Times, and according to police body camera footage the Times reviewed, a pastor named Stephen C. Lee stalked and pressured Freeman. Lee was seen wearing his clerical collar and sitting in a red sedan parked near Freeman’s house on Dec. 15, 2020. Freeman had called the cops after Lee knocked on her door and then lingered nearby.

Lee spoke with the officer who arrived and said that Lee had come to offer “pro bono service” to Freeman. “I’m a pastor, and I’m also with some folks who are trying to help Ruby out, OK?” Lee said. “And also get some truth of what’s going on.”

Lee figures in the next disturbing instance as well. As part of her probe, District Attorney Willis sought testimony from one Willie Lewis Floyd III, who was a director of “Black Voices for Trump,” a group seeking to increase Trump’s support among Black voters. In December 2020, Floyd was asked, apparently by Lee, to arrange a meeting with Freeman to discuss a supposed “immunity deal.” 

Floyd then had a woman named Trevian Kutti, who had once worked as a publicist for (checks notes) Kanye West and disgraced R&B singer R. Kelly, go meet with Freeman at her home.

It gets even weirder and scarier from there.

Per reporting by AP, during a meeting captured on body camera footage occurring just two days before the January 6, 2021 insurrection, while Trump was still in power, Kutti told Freeman that “an armed squad” of federal officers would approach her and her family within 48 hours, and that Kutti had access to “very high-profile people that can make particular things happen in order to defend yourself and your family,” according to a court filing.

Freeman had understandably called the cops again, so by agreement Freeman and Kutti later met at the Cobb County Police Department, where Kutti told her something else: that an event would soon affect her “freedom and the freedom of one or more of your family members” and would soon “disrupt your freedom” if Freeman declined her assistance. Kutti warned that Freeman was “a loose end for a party that needs to tidy up,” according to a court filing.

Freeman said Kutti and Floyd, who was on the phone with them, tried to pressure her into saying she had committed voter fraud. Kutti warned her that she would go to jail if she did not “tell everything.” 

In the face of these threats, Freeman maintained she had done nothing illegal or wrong.

A big question in my own mind now is whether District Attorney Willis, who has indicated that racketeering charges may be brought in her case, has connected any dots from Lee, Floyd and Kutti on the one hand to the Trump Campaign, including Rudy Giuliani, on the other. Willis brought each of these witnesses in for questioning before the grand jury, but we don’t know what they said.

Ruined lives, measure of justice

At their testimony in Washington before the January 6 Committee, Freeman and Moss understandably grew emotional, searing into our national conscience the depravity of Trump and his campaign. 

Moss testified that she received messages “wishing death upon me. Telling me that I’ll be in jail with my mother. And saying things like, ‘Be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920.’”

“I’ve lost my name, and I’ve lost my reputation,” Freeman testified. “Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?”

Freeman has said she doesn’t feel safe anywhere she goes any more. 

I’ve written before about how the far-right uses “stochastic terrorism” to accomplish its goals. That is, it smears certain groups or individuals knowing that there are some people out there, statistically speaking, whom they know will be whipped up and take matters into their own hands. That is certainly what happened here, with MAGA extremists coming for and threatening Freeman and Moss.

But the facts suggest that there may have been something more here going on, enough to justify charges against Giuliani and Trump. 

There is no question that the two of them knowingly and intentionally painted targets on Freeman and Moss to fuel their false election claims and conspiracies. And now Giuliani has admitted as much in a federal court filing. We don’t know if either of them took things even further and either knew about, authorized or helped plan further direct, mob-like threats upon Freeman. Lee, Floyd and Kutti could have been zealots acting on their own, or they could be part of a larger conspiracy.

I take a bit of comfort knowing that Freeman and Moss have already successfully sued OAN and now have Giuliani on the ropes legally for having ruined their reputations and their lives. Money can’t get them back their peace of mind and sense of personal security, but it can allow them to start over in a safer place. 

And if Giuliani and Trump are ultimately convicted for their lies and their fraud, there will be a measure of justice there for Freeman and Ross as well. They deserve nothing less.