Ruby Freeman, a former Georgia election worker, said she was already reeling from a campaign of violent and racist threats against her three years ago when Donald Trump decided to make her an even bigger target.
On the witness stand in federal court Wednesday, Freeman described how Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, falsely accused her of manipulating ballots in the 2020 election — a smear campaign that prompted a torrent of threatening messages and upended her life.
But when Trump took those false claims and echoed them — in an infamous phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — the threats became even more pernicious, she said.
“I just felt like ‘really?’ This is the former president talking about me? Me? How mean, how evil? I just was devastated,” Freeman recalled, fighting back tears as she recounted the episode. “I didn’t do nothing. It just made me feel … you don’t care that I’m a real person.”
“He didn’t know what he was talking about really,” Freeman continued, refusing to use Trump’s name but addressing him as “45.” “He had no clue what he was talking about. He was just trying to put a name to somebody stealing ballots, which was totally a lie.”
Trump mentioned Freeman 18 times on the Jan. 2, 2021, call with Raffensperger. An audio recording of that call was published in the media the next day. Freeman’s lawyers noted in court that Trump’s rhetoric echoed language crafted by Giuliani’s legal team as part of a last ditch PR blitz in connection with their effort to subvert the 2020 election and keep Trump in power.
As the claims spread among Trump’s followers — even as Georgia election officials sought to debunk them — Freeman said the threats to her became more acute. People began showing up to her home, sending threatening voicemails and letters and bombarding her social media accounts with violent and racist vitriol.
Eventually, Freeman said, she left her longtime home on advice of the FBI after learning that her name appeared on a “death list” kept by someone who had just been arrested. Her testimony was likely a reference to Thomas Caldwell, an Oath Keeper affiliate who was one of the earliest defendants arrested just days after the Jan. 6 attack.
Freeman’s powerful testimony came in a jury trial in Washington stemming from a civil lawsuit she and her daughter Shaye Moss filed two years ago, accusing Giuliani of defaming them and intentionally inflicting emotional distress on them.
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