Shaye Moss woke up on Dec. 4, 2020, thinking she might be in line for a promotion after overseeing a grueling but accurate count of presidential ballots in Atlanta’s State Farm Arena.
Instead, she stepped into a nightmare.
That day, the Trump campaign and Rudy Giuliani began spreading and promoting a lie that Moss was at the center of a vote-stealing effort to flip votes in Georgia from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. And it precipitated a torrent of threats and racist attacks that haven’t stopped since.
“I was afraid for my life,” Moss told jurors from the witness stand Tuesday in a Washington, D.C., courthouse where she and her mother, Ruby Freeman, are seeking tens of millions of dollars in damages from Giuliani.
Moss described the sinking feeling moments after her supervisor showed her the false claims that had begun spreading online, drawn from surveillance video in the State Farm Arena showing election workers performing routine tasks. But Giuliani and others twisted the video to contend that it really showed a massive election fraud operation, helmed by Moss and Freeman, that should result in prison time.
Moss has already told a version of her story to the nation, appearing for testimony in a public hearing of the House Jan. 6 select committee last year. But Tuesday was her chance to retell the horrors she experienced straight to the man she says is primarily responsible for her anguish: Giuliani.
“How can someone with so much power go public and talk about things that he obviously has no clue about?” Moss wondered, under questioning from one of her attorneys, John Langford. “It’s just obvious that it’s lies. It’s hurtful. It’s untrue, and it’s unfair.”
Giuliani’s allegations — that Moss and Freeman orchestrated the ouster of election observers, concocted a false story about a water main break, trucked suitcases of fraudulent ballots and passed USB drives around to manipulate vote tallies — have all been debunked repeatedly by elections investigators. But he and Trump helped amplify them during the frenzied final weeks of Trump’s presidency, as he sought to cling to power despite his defeat.
Jurors got to hear Moss describe her rapid descent from her “bubbly” and “happy” existence into a life of fear and dread, losing the job she said she had hoped to retire in and having to upend her entire existence — from her appearance to her attitude.
“Every single aspect of my life has changed. I am literally not even that same person that was smiling on those selfies,” Moss said. “Everything’s changed. Everything’s turned upside-down. Everything is different.”
“People are messaging me,” Moss recalled, “calling, texting, online, saying that I need to die, they’re gonna kill me, they want to kill my mom, they know where we are, they know where we sleep and we should die.”
Giuliani sat silently at the defense table as the powerful testimony unfolded. He occasionally looked at Moss and jotted down notes with a Sharpie.
Langford played video clips for the jury of Giuliani on his video podcast, “Common Sense,” declaring that Moss and other election workers were engaging in blatant ballot rigging. The lawyer for Moss and Freeman followed up those clips with threatening and racist messages that Moss received on Facebook shortly after Giuliani leveled his unfounded accusations on Facebook.
One message shown to jurors told Moss to “be glad its [sic] 2020 and not 1920.”
Moss said the reference to her race was clear.
“Everyone knows exactly what a Black woman would be doing in 1920,” Moss said.
Some of the messages said Moss had committed treason. She said she initially didn’t know what the word meant, recalling only that it had some historic significance, perhaps related to Paul Revere. But the references to her being put to death alarmed her.
“They could hang me and hang my mom, that was my concern,” Moss said.
After the messages were shown, Langford gestured at Giuliani, suggesting that the vulgar messages Moss was receiving were the direct product of the Trump lawyer’s public allegations.
Giuliani’s lawyer, Joseph Sibley, told jurors in an opening statement Monday that his client had not made any racist remarks or issued any threats. However, the former New York mayor unambiguously accused the poll workers of crimes.
“These people should all go to jail — for a long time,” Giuliani said in one clip shown to the jury.
Freeman, who worked alongside her daughter on Election Day and is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit, appeared to tear up as her daughter began emotionally recounting her experiences. A member of their legal team handed her a stack of tissues. Freeman, who also appeared before the Jan. 6 committee, is expected to testify later in the trial and describe how Giuliani’s false claims forced her to rebrand her business, sell her home and conceal her identity.
Moss said that in the wake of the fraud allegations she rarely goes out and in particular avoids doing so with her mother. “Definitely not. I don’t want anyone to see my mom and I together. They might recognize us,” she said.
Moss seemed careful not to explicitly reference Trump supporters, even as she expressed continuing fear of those who’d heard what she repeatedly called “lies” about her. She said she had dreams about being accosted by “political people,” but never made any reference to Trump, although the judge has ruled that Giuliani is liable as part of a civil conspiracy for libelous statements Trump made about the actions Moss and Freeman took.
The plaintiff’s attorneys also spent portions of Tuesday’s proceedings showing jurors deposition testimony of two Georgia election investigators who probed and discredited the false allegations lodged by Giuliani and others. Those investigators, Frank Braun III and Frances Watson, described reviewing the surveillance footage that Giuliani had mischaracterized, reviewing voting machine logs, talking to witnesses and more. They determined that the footage showed election workers performing routine, unremarkable tasks.
Moss repeatedly emphasized that the videos in question simply reflected her doing her job.
“It shows us working,” she said. “The same procedures I’ve done for years.”
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