It wasn’t just Giuliani, Trump also made the lives of Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss a nightmare

Trump is even more responsible

Indicted and soon to be disbarred lawyer Rudy Giuliani was ordered Friday by a federal jury to pay former Georgia election workers Shaye Moss and Ruby “Lady” Freeman nearly $150 million in damages for his repeated and false accusations against them after the 2020 election. As Lady Freeman said after the verdict, “Today is a good day. A jury stood witness to what Rudy Giuliani did to me and my daughter. And they held him accountable. And for that, I’m thankful.”

But the reality is that Donald Trump also repeatedly and intentionally spewed lies about Moss and Freeman that contributed to this nightmare. In fact, after all the media coverage of the hell these two suffered during last year’s Jan 6 hearings, Trump in January 2023—yes, 2023—took to his social media platform to again accuse Freeman by name of both lying and election crimes.  

As a quick refresher, Shaye Moss was employed full time as an election worker for the Fulton County Elections Office since 2017, a job she loved. Her mother, Lady Freeman, had worked in local government for years until she retired. However, given the impact of Covid, the Fulton County election board was in need of temporary workers to administer the 2020 election and Freeman stepped up to fill that role.

After that election, Trump refused to accept that he lost Georgia.  That is when Trump began targeting Georgia officials including the GOP Governor and GOP Secretary of State in an effort to bully them into supporting his coup. But no one was targeted with more lies than Freeman and Moss, two Black women.

On December 3, 2020, Trump’s allies claimed at a hearing before Georgia GOP legislators that--based on surveillance footage--Moss and Freeman had brought in suitcases filled with fraudulent ballots for Joe Biden. In reality, the ballots were simply being stored consistent with the procedures of the Fulton County Election board—a point that even GOP election officials like Gabe Sterling made publicly on December 4, 2020.

But as we know, the truth doesn’t matter to Trump and his allies. Despite GOP elected officials debunking the lies the day before, Trump played footage of Freeman and Moss at a December 5 rally in Valdosta, Georgia, saying it showed a “crime” committed by “Democrat workers.”  These lies were also amplified by the Trump campaign, Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis, Sean Hannity and especially the right wing channel, One America News (OANN).

Then came the infamous hearing in December 10, 2020, when Giuliani told Georgia lawmakers that he would “like to focus on the two people that are involved in this” – Freeman and Moss. He then accused the mother and daughter of “stealing votes,” hacking into Georgia’s voting machines and passing USB thumb drives between them, “as if they’re vials of heroin and cocaine. I mean it’s obvious to anyone who is a criminal investigator or prosecutor, they’re engaged in surreptitious illegal activity.” (Again, all lies debunked days before that hearing.)

Trump also personally amplified this BS, retweeting on December 22 to his 80 million Twitter followers a segment from right wing cable news channel OANN featuring an “investigation” that repeated the lies against the Freeman and Moss.

As a result, Freeman and Moss were inundated with vile, racist threats. Freeman made a series of 911 emergency calls in the days after she was publicly identified by Trump’s camp. On December 4 call, she told the dispatcher she’d gotten a flood of “threats and phone calls and racial slurs,” adding: “It’s scary because they’re saying stuff like, ‘We’re coming to get you. We are coming to get you.’”

A few days later, a frightened Freeman again called 911 after hearing loud banging on her door just before 10 p.m. She begged the dispatcher for assistance: “Lord Jesus, where’s the police?...Please help me.”

That takes us to Trump’s infamous phone call on January 2, 2021, to GOP Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger where he directed him to “find” one more vote than Biden had received in Georgia. During that phone call, Trump mentioned Freeman’s name 18 times—yes 18 times-- as he smeared her with lies calling her “a professional vote scammer,” a “hustler” and referring to “the phony ballots of Ruby Freeman — known scammer.” He even claimed that by his own ‘painstaking” count, Freeman was responsible for “18,000” fraudulent ballots.

After that phone call was released to the public the next day, the level of threats and harassment versus Freeman escalated. As Moss emotionally testified last June before the Jan 6 committee,  they were subjected to “a lot of threats, wishing death upon me — telling me that, you know, I’ll be in jail with my mother and saying things like ‘be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920.’”

Lady Freeman’s words to the committee were bone-chilling: “Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you? The president of the United States is supposed to represent every American. Not to target one. But he targeted me.”  She noted that as a result, “There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere.”

Even Moss’s grandmother was being targeted, calling Moss one day, screaming that people had knocked on her door and, when she had opened it, they attempted to push into the home in search of Moss and Freeman.

The threats against Freeman reached such an alarming levels that the FBI contacted her early in the week of Jan 6 and advised her to leave her home for safety reasons. At first, she stayed with friends. But they soon became concerned about their own safety, ultimately forcing Freeman to stay at Airbnbs at her own cost.

Yet despite the tsunami of media coverage of the threats versus Freeman and the lawsuit filed versus Giuliani, in early January of this year, Trump took to his social media platform to smear her with even more lies. One of his posts claimed that Freeman had lied to officials when talking about the vote counting, committed “FRAUD” and alleged that she “Cut the zip ties” on ballots to allow her to scan ballots to change the results.

Trump is even more responsible for what happened to Moss and Freeman than Giuliani given all of these actions were carried out on Trump’s behalf. And not once did Trump condemn the attacks.

The question many have is why wasn’t Trump sued like Giuliani (and OANN News which settled in 2022.) Freeman did raise that possibility Friday night with her comment: “Today is not the end of the road. We still have work to do. Rudy Giuliani was not the only one who spread lies about us. And others must be held accountable to.”

Perhaps the hesitance to sue Trump was that the bulk of his actions were committed when he was in office, thus, raising question about whether he was immune for civil liability. The good news on that front is that earlier in December, the US Court of Appeals in D.C. ruled Trump is not immune for civil claims by people injured in the Jan 6 attack.

But even if Freeman and Moss don’t sue Trump, their stories will be evidence used to convict Trump in both his Jan 6 case in D.C. and his Georgia RICO case. In the Georgia criminal case, three defendants have been charged with crimes for harassing Freeman—and those crimes are part of the evidence that will be introduced to convict Trump in the sprawling RICO case.

In the Jan 6 case, Jack Smith’s offices recently informed the judge that they will introduce evidence of Trump’s attacks on Moss and Freeman to bolster their case.  As Smith’s office noted in their filing: "Long after the charged conduct, the defendant continued to falsely attack two Georgia election workers, despite being on notice that his claims about them in 2020 were false and had subjected them to vile, racist, and violent threats and harassment."

Freeman and Moss didn’t deserve any of this. They do, however, deserve justice. And finally, they are seeing the first steps in that process--a process that will only end when Trump and Giuliani are behind bars for the rest of their unnatural lives.

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