Two Georgia election workers targeted by a vicious campaign of false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election target pro-Trump television network One America News, the owners of OAN, a network correspondent and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani sued a federal court.
On Thursday, two election workers, Rudy Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, of Giuliani, OAN, OAN executives Robert and Charles Herring, and OAN correspondent Chanel Rion, faced defamation, willful infliction of emotional distress and civil conspiracy in promoting the allegations claims that Freeman and Moss, both black, committed electoral fraud during the Georgia vote count for the 2020 election.
The defendants, the complaint states, “are responsible for the partisan character assassination of Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss. The defendants have made a concerted effort to accuse Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss, by name, of election fraud to change the outcome of the Georgia 2020 presidential election. “
The lawsuit has been filed in federal court in Washington, DC
A Herring Networks spokesman, who was asked for comment, said the company would respond to “no questions from reporters” and referred Rolling Stone to an outside lawyer. A message to this attorney resulted in an out-of-office reply. Rudy Giuliani did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Freeman and Moss say they have been molested online and physically because of the fake claims made about them. They have described receiving a constant stream of hateful messages containing racist slurs and threats of being lynched. On January 6, court records said a crowd surrounded Freeman’s home on foot and in cars. An FBI agent later told Freeman that her and her daughter’s names were on a list of people to be executed; The list was found in the possession of a person believed to have participated in the January 6 riot Reuters. As a result, Freeman and Moss say they avoid going out in public whenever possible, changing their appearance so as not to be recognized, and living normal lives for fear of being attacked or assaulted.
This is the second lawsuit brought by Freeman and Moss against those who spread conspiracy theories about them. At the beginning of December they have sued far-right blog The Gateway Pundit and the two brothers who run it, Jim and Joe Hoft. They alleged that Gateway Pundit, a notorious promoter of false stories, and the Höfts had repeatedly defamed them.
The lawsuit is part of a wider effort by Protect Democracy and its group Law for truth project goal to defend victims of harmful disinformation and conspiracy theories, including election officials, through libel suits. One of the lawyers representing Freeman and Moss in their new lawsuit is Michael Gottlieb, a partner in Willkie Gallagher, previously James Alefantis, a victim of Pizzagate conspiracy theory, and Aaron Rich, who was the target of baseless allegations related to his brother Sethwho worked for the Democratic National Committee and was killed in July 2016.
The first spark in the unsubstantiated claims against Freeman and Moss came weeks after Joe Biden won Georgia and his Secretary of State confirmed that narrow victory. At the time, conservative media outlets and pro-Trump pundits were consumed by wild theories about counting irregularities in the state’s urban counties. A small water leak caused by an overflowing urinal in the State Farm Arena in Atlanta – a main system for processing ballot papers – somehow became evidence of a sinister conspiracy to rig the presidential election.
On December 3, 2020, when the conservative media touted theory based on alleged electoral fraud theory, Trump became an advocate for the election campaign of former President Trump testified before the Georgia Senate. Attorney Jacki Pick played several short clips from a 14-hour surveillance video of workers counting absenteeism and military votes in the State Farm Arena on election day.
When the silent clips played, Pick claimed it showed evidence of criminals caught in the act. Pick testified that the election officials in the video first told the Republican observers on site to go home for the day. “As soon as everyone is gone, the coast will be clear, they will pull ballots out from under a table,” said Pick, adding that there were enough false ballots in the alleged suitcases to tip Biden when he voted.
Pick did not name the poll workers in the video, but said that “one of them had the name Ruby on her shirt somewhere”. Conservative blogs eventually discovered that two of the people in the video were Ruby Freeman, who had served as a temporary polling worker in Fulton County, and their daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, who had worked full-time in the Fulton County’s registration and election department for eight Years.
The Georgia State Department and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation investigated Pick’s allegations and found no evidence to support their claims. But conservative media and Trump surrogates ran along.
One America News, a slavish pro-Trump media company that has been reinforcing other conspiracy theories and trying to compete with Fox News, aired the edited surveillance video of the Trump campaign later on the same day as Trump’s attorney Pick said in Georgia it in the lawsuit. Giuliani and Rion, the OAN correspondent, shared the edited video and baseless theory about “suitcases” full of false voices.
On December 23, 2020, the lawsuit states, OAN published a story entitled “Fulton County, Georgia election workers who focused on Freeman and Moss. Caught on camera scanning the same batch of ballot papers multiple times”. During a show he hosted on Rumble, Giuliani further accused Freeman and Moss of participating in an election fraud program, saying, “It’s pretty clear, no matter who you’re doing it for, you’re cheating. It looks like a bank robbery. ”Giuliani repeated these allegations several times on his show, in interviews he gave to various OAN programs, and even from the stage during his speech at the Save America rally on January 6th, the Immediately preceded the U.S. Capitol Rebellion.
The Freeman and Moss lawsuit alleges that the defendants continued to spread harmful lies about them after both local news organizations and information outlets exposed the allegations and Freeman and Moss attorneys urged the defendants to correct the records or withdraw certain allegations .
