Two Georgia women, collateral damage of Trump’s election lies, are finally cleared of wrongdoing
Nearly one year to the day after Wandrea “Shaye” Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, revealed to the nation how their lives were upended when Donald Trump implicated them in his Big Lie, a Georgia state election board at long last concluded that the former president’s accusations against the two Black women were “false and unsubstantiated.”
Not that there should have been any doubt. For more than two years, every word Trump and his allies have uttered about the historic 2020 presidential election that he soundly lost to Joe Biden has been a lie.
In a statement, Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state whom Trump tried to pressure into overturning Joe Biden’s victory in that state in 2020, said, “False claims and knowingly false allegations made against these election workers have done tremendous harm.”
That “tremendous harm” included a torrent of harassment, racist invective, and death threats. In December 2020, Rudy Giuliani started spreading lies that Moss and Freeman were seen scanning “suitcases” of fake ballots. And — leaning into racist tropes, as usual — he claimed the two were exchanging “USB drives” full of fraudulent votes “as if they were vials of heroin or cocaine.”
What Moss passed to her mother was a ginger mint. But once Trump and conspiracy theorists amplified Giuliani’s phony accusations, Moss and Freeman became collateral damage of one defeated man’s monstrous lies. Moss quit her job at the Fulton County Registration and Elections Department, where she had worked for more than 10 years. Freeman said she no longer felt safe even in familiar places, like her local grocery store.
When she testified last year before the House subcommittee investigating the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection, Freeman posed this devastating question: “Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States to target you?”
During Trump’s catastrophic White House years, too many people found out how that feels in ways that cost them their careers and their privacy and undermined their safety.
In 2018, Christine Blasey Ford, a research psychologist, made credible sexual assault allegations under oath against Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s second Supreme Court nominee. She was mocked by Trump and lambasted on Fox News. Kavanaugh was confirmed as the high court’s 114th justice; meanwhile, Ford received so many death threats, she and her family had to move out of their home to an undisclosed location.
Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council specialist on Russia, was inundated with threats and antisemitic hate speech in 2019 after she expressed concerns about Trump’s attempts to coerce Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky into announcing a bogus investigation into Hunter Biden to bolster Trump’s chances in the 2020 presidential election.
Trump called Marie Yovanovitch, a former ambassador to Ukraine, “bad news” when he believed she was getting in the way of his Ukraine machinations. He told Zelensky, “She’s going to go through some things” — and she did, becoming the target of right-wing threats and insults and having her reputation tarnished. Alexander Vindman, a decorated Army lieutenant colonel, was forced to retire after he testified against Trump in the former president’s first impeachment concerning his pressure tactics on Ukraine.
Unlike Vindman, Hill, and Yovanovitch, Moss and Freeman existed far from the rooms of power and influence. They were what Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the Jan. 6 committee’s chairman, called “two of the unsung heroes in this country doing the hard work of keeping our democracy functioning for every American.”
But how does one recover after being attacked by the president? Does that person ever feel safe saying their name in public, or do fears of reprisal remain too great? Can someone ever feel whole again after her life and reputation have been sullied because a mean, insecure man refused to accept the will of 81 million Americans?
The deep pain Moss and Freeman endured because of Trump was palpable to anyone who watched their testimony. Let the end of the Georgia election board’s long investigation bring them some measure of peace. (They are suing Giuliani for defamation, and I hope they take him for every last cent he has.)
When Moss spoke before the committee, she talked about how she grew up hearing about the importance of voting and how older generations in her family were never allowed to exercise that right. That’s why, she said, it meant so much for her to help people in her community vote.
With his scorched-earth mendacity, Trump and his followers tried to mark Moss and Freeman as agents against democracy. Instead, like generations of Black women before them, they were its ardent guardians and defenders.