The Gateway Pundit, a far-right news site that repeatedly published bogus stories claiming that the 2020 election was stolen, has settled a defamation lawsuit brought by Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two Georgia election workers whom the site falsely reported had tampered with the election results in their state.<\/p>\n
A notice of the settlement was filed on the Missouri Courts website on Monday afternoon. \u201cThe Parties have reached agreement to settle all claims and counterclaims asserted in the \u2026 action,\u201d the notice read. The language specified that \u201cthe Parties respectfully request that this Court vacate the trial date set in this matter and stay this matter until March 29, 2025, at which point the Parties will dismiss this matter pending satisfaction of the terms of the Parties\u2019 settlement agreement.\u201d<\/p>\n
The terms of the settlement, which was first reported by the Gateway Journalism Review, were not disclosed.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe dispute between the parties has been resolved to the mutual satisfaction of the parties through a fair and reasonable settlement,\u201d according to a statement issued by the legal team for Freeman and her daughter, Moss. Protect Democracy is representing the two women, along with several private law firms and attorneys and the Yale Law School\u2019s Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic.<\/p>\n
Jim Hoft, the founder and owner of the Gateway Pundit, did not respond to an email seeking comment.<\/p>\n
But the six-month delay between the announcement of the settlement and the March 29 date could signify that there are certain requirements that the site needs to fulfill to satisfy the terms of the settlement, according to legal experts.<\/p>\n
In April 2022, Freeman and Moss settled a similar claim with One America News Network. Terms were not disclosed. OANN later broadcast a statement saying that a Georgia investigation by the state\u2019s officials had shown that the women \u201cdid not engage in ballot fraud or criminal misconduct while working at State Farm Arena on election night.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Gateway Pundit wrote a series of articles about the 2020 presidential election amplifying spurious claims that Freeman and Moss and former Dominion executive Eric Coomer helped rig the 2020 election in favor of Joe Biden. The Gateway Pundit denied wrongdoing and previously said it was seeking bankruptcy protection to fight against \u201cprogressive liberal lawfare attacks\u201d against the site.<\/p>\n
In July, a federal judge in Florida threw out a bankruptcy case filed by the Gateway Pundit, ruling that the site sought bankruptcy protection in \u201cbad faith\u201d to avoid having to pay potential damages in defamation suits related to the site\u2019s reporting on the 2020 election.<\/p>\n
The ruling allowed the defamation cases, which had been held up during the bankruptcy proceedings, to proceed.<\/p>\n
Moss had served as a poll worker in Fulton County for more than a decade. In 2020, she urged her mother to join her.<\/p>\n
Their lives changed irrevocably on Dec. 10, 2020, when Rudy Giuliani, then President Donald Trump\u2019s top campaign lawyer, publicly claimed at a state senate hearing that the mother-daughter pair had rigged the outcome in their state. Giuliani and his allies claimed the two poll workers could be seen cheating on behalf of Biden on surveillance video at a massive vote-counting facility inside Atlanta\u2019s State Farm Arena.<\/p>\n
Showing choppy black-and-white footage captured by overhead cameras, the team claimed that Freeman and Moss had pulled mystery \u201csuitcases\u201d full of forged ballots from under a table and run them, in some cases three times, through tabulation machines. They claimed that Freeman and Moss passed a memory stick between them to try to hack into the tabulation machines \u2014 an act that Giuliani described as a \u201cpowerful smoking gun.\u201d<\/p>\n
That day, the Gateway Pundit published the first of 58 articles on the women that would appear over the next year and a half. The Gateway Pundit\u2019s stories cast Freeman and Moss as \u201ccrooked\u201d operatives who counted \u201cillegal ballots from a suitcase stashed under a table!\u201d<\/p>\n
In the days after the first allegations, the Trump campaign released ads featuring footage from the December hearing. Trump himself called Freeman a \u201cprofessional vote scammer and hustler.\u201d<\/p>\n
The claims were false, according to Gabriel Sterling, a top aide to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R), who distributed and explained the full surveillance video in the days following the hearing. Sterling showed how Giuliani\u2019s team had selectively edited the tape to suggest the boxes had been smuggled in. Giuliani\u2019s team had also obscured the moment when the ballot boxes \u2014 not suitcases, but authorized storage cases for ballots \u2014 were placed under the table in open view of news media and Republican poll watchers after county election officials announced that they would be going home for the evening. Only after Raffensperger\u2019s office instructed the county not to suspend the count that evening did Freeman and Moss pull the ballot cases back out from under the table to resume their work.<\/p>\n
The women would also later explain that the \u201cmemory stick\u201d they had allegedly passed between them was a mint.<\/p>\n
None of the explanations stopped them from becoming targets of harassment, threats and racist attacks. \u201cIt was just a lot of horrible things there,\u201d Moss said at a hearing in June 2022 before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Many of the messages were racist and \u201chateful,\u201d said Moss, who, like her mother, is Black.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of threats wishing death upon me, telling me I\u2019ll be in jail with my mother and saying things like, \u2018Be glad it\u2019s 2020 and not 1920.\u2019 \u201d In one instance, a publicist for hip-hop artist and Trump ally Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, confronted Freeman at her home and urged her to confess to the fraud or she would go to jail. Freeman refused. She also went into hiding.<\/p>\n
\u201cI lost my name, I\u2019ve lost my reputation,\u201d Freeman testified. \u201cI\u2019ve lost my sense of security \u2014 all because a group of people, starting with Number 45 and his ally Rudy Giuliani, decided to scapegoat me and my daughter, Shaye, to push their own lies about how the presidential election was stolen.\u201d<\/p>\n
Last year, in the midst of a defamation suit filed against him by Freeman and Moss that he eventually lost, Giuliani declared in a court filing that he was no longer contesting their claims that his statements were false.<\/p>\n
Although Giuliani lost his Moss-Freeman defamation suit, he has avoided paying out the $148 million awarded by the court. The two women sued him in August in an attempt to seize his assets, including his condos in New York and Florida, and also his New York Yankees World Series rings \u2014 among the items he listed as assets when he filed for bankruptcy during the defamation case. A status conference scheduled for Oct. 17 in federal court in the Southern District of New York will hear arguments related to that case.<\/p>\n
The Gateway Pundit still faces a separate defamation suit from Coomer, the former Dominion Voting Systems executive who was falsely accused by Trump allies of helping to swing the 2020 election.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The Gateway Pundit, a far-right news site that repeatedly published bogus stories claiming that the 2020 election was stolen, has settled a defamation lawsuit brought by Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two Georgia election workers whom the site falsely reported had tampered with the election results in their state. A notice of the settlement was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":10922,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10921"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10921\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}