‘I was terrorized’: 2020 election worker testifies at Giuliani defamation trial

Ruby Freeman sobbed on the witness stand. The former election worker said she is afraid to tell anyone her name, has been driven from her home and was terrorized with threatening phone calls and letters after Rudy Giuliani, a key Trump ally and the former New York mayor, spread lies about her in 2020.

Freeman began her testimony in federal court on Wednesday by introducing herself to the jury as “Lady Ruby”, saying the name was “special, unique and classy”. But, she says, she’s stopped using the name because she fears what would happen if someone were to recognize her. When she goes out, she wears sunglasses and a mask.

“I don’t have a name no more,” she said. “The only thing you have in your life is your name … my life is messed up. My life is really messed up.”

“I was terrorized,” she added. “Sometimes I don’t know who I am.”

Freeman’s testimony is at the center of a weeklong trial to determine how much in damages Giuliani should have to pay Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss. Moss gave several hours of haunting testimony on Tuesday about the long-lasting damage Giuliani’s lies have caused her. They are seeking $15.5m to $43m in damages from Giuliani.

The case is seen as a test for one avenue pro-democracy groups are using to try to hold election deniers accountable for the consequences of spreading conspiracy theories.

Freeman started getting threats in December 2020, and in early January 2021 the FBI told her she wasn’t safe at her home in the Atlanta suburbs and advised her to leave. As she watched protesters storm the US Capitol, she was horrified. “If they hadn’t told me to leave, that could have been me,” she said.

At first, Freeman said, she stayed with a friend and the friend’s husband, but she eventually left, worrying about putting them in danger. “I felt like a homeless person because someone has to feed you and then you have to leave,” she said. “I’d rather stay in my car and be homeless rather than put that on someone else.”

Then, Freeman stayed in Airbnbs. She didn’t know who to turn to – her daughter was experiencing the same type of harassment, and Freeman didn’t want to drag her mother into it. She didn’t hear from friends.

Eventually, Freeman sold her home in the Atlanta suburbs, taking out a $130,000 home equity loan to do so, after strangers started showing up at her doorstep demanding to speak with her.

Still, she was afraid to go out after dark. When she bought a new home, Freeman said she hired a lawyer because she didn’t want to have the new house in her name. She cried heavily when she described trying to pay a bill and someone insisting she needed ID.

She remains afraid to introduce herself to her new neighbors, she said, and she doesn’t feel like she can go to community activities like karaoke and tennis. “I can’t say who I am,” she said. “I miss my old neighborhood … I could introduce myself.”

She once dreamed of having a bricks-and-mortar store for her traveling fashion boutique, LaRuby’s Unique Treasures. Now, she’s had to change the name. She used to travel to shows to promote her business, but now she can’t because she’s afraid someone will recognize her.

She had immense pride in the business, which was why she wore a shirt with her name bedazzled on it on election night. It was the shirt that helped Trump allies identify her that night.

These days, she said, she’s on an “emotional roller-coaster”. Some days she’ll go through her house screaming “to maintain my sanity”.

In her testimony, Freeman refused to even say Donald Trump’s name, simply referring to him as “45” and then “the former president”. She said she thought Trump and his allies were looking for a way to justify his loss and she got caught in the crosshairs.

“I felt like this was a plan from the beginning,” she said. “They filled in the blanks with my name.”

A reputational repair campaign would cost anywhere between $17.8m and $47.4m, the expert, Ashlee Humphreys, a marketing professor at Northwestern testified . Given the entrenched beliefs of those who believed Giuliani’s lies, she said an appropriate estimate for a campaign would be $28.4m to $47.4m.

Humphreys spent much of the morning walking the jury through an analysis of receptive impressions – essentially views by people likely to believe them – the false statements generated on social media, television, podcasts and other media. Defamatory statements between 3 December 2020 and January 2022 had between 35,570,438 and 56,717,742 receptive impressions, she said. Another set of statements made solely in December had between 111.4m and 249.4m impressions.

“The defamatory claims had a significant, negative and long-lasting impact on the reputations of Ms Freeman and Ms Moss,” she said.

Humphreys walked through how search traffic for “Ruby Freeman” went from nonexistent to becoming a figure in rightwing media, including Trump campaign materials and podcasts.

Humphreys said that her analysis of the infamous call between Donald Trump and Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, during which Trump accused Freeman of being a “professional vote scammer”, showed that there were 33m total impressions and 11.7m receptive impressions.

During her testimony, Freeman spoke about her reaction to that call.

A reputational repair campaign would essentially have to counter every false and negative impression about the two women, Humphreys said. And because beliefs had become so entrenched, any positive mention would probably require three to five repetitions to have a positive effect.

Joseph Sibley, an attorney for Rudy Giuliani, sought to undercut Humphreys’ analysis. He suggested that Humphreys had not analyzed the harm of the claims in context with other efforts to debunk Giuliani’s lies, and he questioned whether any reputational campaign or any amount of money could persuade people that the election wasn’t stolen.

“Why are we gonna waste our time with flat Earth people? Should we launch a campaign to convince flat Earth people?” he said.

Related: Giuliani’s lies turned my life ‘upside down’, election worker testifies

But Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and Trump ally has not backed down from his claims this week. After the first day of trial, Giuliani doubled down on his claims, saying they were true, leading the judge to question Giuliani’s mental fitness.

Giuliani was again called out by Judge Beryl Howell for comments made after court, this time about the plaintiffs’ lawyer. Giuliani said he thought he could comment on the lawyer, but Howell said it violated a court stipulation.

“There’s a lot of accidents going on here, Mr Giuliani,” Howell said.