What Happens When the President of the United States Puts a Target on Your Back
Ruby Freeman volunteered to work during the 2020 election. Now she’s in the midst of Fulton County’s racketeering case against Donald Trump.
Ruby Freeman was not looking for fame
when she volunteered as a Fulton County poll worker during the 2020 election. But fame came looking for her when Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani falsely accused her and her daughter Wandrea “Shaye” Moss of adding “suitcases” full of fraudulent Biden ballots to Fulton’s election tally.
Many people who wanted to believe Trump’s lie that the election was stolen relied on edited surveillance video from the State Farm Arena, which showed Freeman removing ballot boxes and scanning the contents into a voting machine.
Few of Trump’s faithful believed the truth
Namely, that 62-year-old Ruby Freeman, her daughter, and the other poll workers were responding to instructions to continue scanning ballots after first being told to stop for the night.
The poll workers followed protocol by sealing and putting the uncounted ballots away. But when they were told to keep working, they pulled those same sealed ballot boxes out again and continued to scan them into the system. There were no suitcases. Only legitimate ballots.
Doxing is the new lynching
Clarence Thomas famously called his 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings a “high-tech lynching,” and isn’t that what happened to Ruby Freeman and her daughter when Donald Trump put a target on their backs?
African Americans know well enough what a lynching is. It’s what happens when a bunch of worked-up white folks come for you. Thanks to the Internet, they don’t need to put on white robes and ride up to your house on horseback. They dox you.
They publish your name, address, and the names of your family members on social media. Doxing is the new lynching. And even if they don’t put a literal noose around your neck and hang you from a tree, your life will never be the same.
Days after a Georgia grand jury indicted Trump and 18 others on racketeering charges, his supporters reportedly leaked the names and addresses of the jury online. During this same week, a Texas woman left a voicemail for the judge in Trump’s January 6th case threatening to kill her.
Ruby Freeman explained the impact of this kind of lynching to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the Capitol Riot in this video.
Touched by an angel?
Technically, doxing is not always illegal, but maybe it should be. Because it lets the crazies loose. And who knows what happens when they show up at your house in the middle of the night? Or follow you home from work.
This is why Ruby Freeman was unnerved when former Kanye West publicist Trevian Kutti knocked on her door and said her life was in imminent danger.
Freeman had already been visited by Rev. Stephen Lee, an “old white man” who knocked on her door and told her to confess to scanning fraudulent Biden ballots into voting machines during the election.
Hearing of this, Harrison Floyd, the former Executive Director of Black Voices for Trump, sent Kutti instead, hoping Ruby Freeman might be more receptive to an African American.
But when Kutti told Freeman to meet her at a nearby police station, Ruby called the police. Was it fear that made her do this? Or was she touched by an angel?
Fortunately, the police officer turned on her bodycam, recording the conversation in which Kutti appeared to harass Freeman, telling her she was in danger, then asked her to speak with Harrison Floyd, whom she contacted by phone.
All of this is detailed in the RICO indictment against Donald Trump and 18 others, brought by Fulton County DA Fani Willis.
Pleading ignorance
People who did not watch the January 6th hearings did not see Freeman or her daughter testify. But they had a good reason for not tuning in.
The hearings were rigged, they said. Nancy Pelosi refused to allow any Republicans on the committee who wanted to broaden the scope to include Black Lives Matter protests that turned violent during 2020.
Perhaps those same people will also choose not to watch Ruby Freeman testify again during the RICO trial. Since Georgia allows courtroom cameras, the entire thing will probably wind up on national TV in the middle of the 2024 presidential election.
Maybe those people won’t even pay attention then
They’ll tell you about Hunter Biden. They’ll call the trial politically motivated election interference. They’ll tell you it’s a dangerous assault on the right to challenge elections.
They will not tell you that the right to challenge an election does not include making baseless, unsupported and defamatory allegations against innocent people who were just doing their job.
But the people who do not want to see or hear Ruby Freeman will only be able to plead ignorance of her high-tech lynching for so long. Because there’s sure to be a movie. The 98-page RICO indictment reads like a script.
Heroic Black women
And who but Angela Bassett should be cast in the lead role? Even if you haven’t seen all of her movies, she exists in the public mind as a heroic Black female.
We watched her set fire to a cheating husband’s BMW in Waiting to Exhale. We saw her stand up to a wife-beating husband in What’s Love Got to Do with It? We watched her as Queen Ramonda in Black Panther, Wakonda Forever, and Avengers: Endgame. In Betty and Coretta, she played the widow of Martin Luther King, Jr. We’ve even seen her take the lead in The Rosa Parks Story.
The thing is, so-called ordinary Black women have been living quietly heroic lives throughout history. They don’t all rise to prominence. They just keep on keeping on. Surviving in a world that has been hostile to them — and their children — for a very long time.
But sometimes, their faith pays off
And the tide turns. Like it seems to be doing for Ruby Freeman. The FBI, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and the Georgia Secretary of State’s office conducted separate investigations into Trump’s claims that she and her daughter had stuffed fake ballots for Biden into voting machines.
All reached the same conclusions as three Georgia recounts, including a hand recount of paper ballots. No violations occurred.
On July 26, Rudy Giuliani conceded in federal court that he made “false, defamatory, and actionable” statements against Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye.
OAN (One America News) has reached a financial settlement with them after promoting the same false charges.
She may see another settlement in a similar media case in Missouri against The Gateway Pundit, identified in federal court filings as
the top producer of false content during and after the 2020 presidential election. In the fourth quarter of 2020,” it achieved 7.2 million shares on social media through ad revenue, for its bogus election fraud stories.
In January of this year, she received the Presidential Citizenship Medal from the Biden White House. And now she is a key part of a criminal RICO indictment against the former president of the United States and 18 others, including those two Black voices for Trump, who wanted her to “confess” to something she did not do.
Even if Georgia’s RICO indictment fails, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss have been exonerated and vindicated by something Donald Trump is a stranger to. The truth.
And that’s too bad. Because “the mills of God grind slowly; Yet they grind exceeding small.”
Sixty-three years ago,
another Ruby—six-year-old Ruby Bridges—changed the world when she became the first African American child to attend a formerly whites-only elementary school during the New Orleans school desegregation crisis of 1960.
The situation was so fraught that federal marshals had to escort her to and from school. That brave little first-grader was the only African American to attend Frantz Elementary that year. As one of the Marshals later recalled: “She showed a lot of courage. She never cried. She didn't whimper. She just marched along like a little soldier, and we're all very very proud of her.”
That little Ruby was a “bridge” to a world in which Black children and white children were no longer bound by old hatreds. The story of today’s Ruby—Ruby Freeman—is a cautionary tale about what it sometimes takes to hold on to the life and liberty guaranteed to everyone by our nation’s foundational documents. Not just the rich and powerful.
Fortunately, none of us has to take that difficult journey alone. Because it is written: “with patience He stands waiting, With exactness grinds He all.”
©2023 Andrew ‘Jazprose’ Hill | All rights reserved
Thanks for reading.
I called her straight away to ask if she was ok. She assured me that she was.
It’s so crazy to see my relative in all these headlines connected to this scandal! Trevian is family!!!