Gateway Pundit settles with Georgia election workers in defamation suit

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 filed on the Missouri Courts website on Monday afternoon. “The Parties have reached agreement to settle all claims and counterclaims asserted in the … action,” the notice read. The language specified that “the 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’ settlement agreement.”

The terms of the settlement, which was first reported by the Gateway Journalism Review, were not disclosed.

“The dispute between the parties has been resolved to the mutual satisfaction of the parties through a fair and reasonable settlement,” 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’s Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic.

Jim Hoft, the founder and owner of the Gateway Pundit, did not respond to an email seeking comment.

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.

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’s officials had shown that the women “did not engage in ballot fraud or criminal misconduct while working at State Farm Arena on election night.”

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 “progressive liberal lawfare attacks” against the site.

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 “bad faith” to avoid having to pay potential damages in defamation suits related to the site’s reporting on the 2020 election.

The ruling allowed the defamation cases, which had been held up during the bankruptcy proceedings, to proceed.

Moss had served as a poll worker in Fulton County for more than a decade. In 2020, she urged her mother to join her.

Their lives changed irrevocably on Dec. 10, 2020, when Rudy Giuliani, then President Donald Trump’s 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’s State Farm Arena.

Showing choppy black-and-white footage captured by overhead cameras, the team claimed that Freeman and Moss had pulled mystery “suitcases” 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 — an act that Giuliani described as a “powerful smoking gun.”

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’s stories cast Freeman and Moss as “crooked” operatives who counted “illegal ballots from a suitcase stashed under a table!”

In the days after the first allegations, the Trump campaign released ads featuring footage from the December hearing. Trump himself called Freeman a “professional vote scammer and hustler.”

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’s team had selectively edited the tape to suggest the boxes had been smuggled in. Giuliani’s team had also obscured the moment when the ballot boxes — not suitcases, but authorized storage cases for ballots — 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’s 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.

The women would also later explain that the “memory stick” they had allegedly passed between them was a mint.

None of the explanations stopped them from becoming targets of harassment, threats and racist attacks. “It was just a lot of horrible things there,” 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 “hateful,” said Moss, who, like her mother, is Black.

“A lot of threats wishing death upon me, telling me I’ll be in jail with my mother and saying things like, ‘Be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920.’ ” 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.

“I lost my name, I’ve lost my reputation,” Freeman testified. “I’ve lost my sense of security — 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.”

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.

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 — 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.

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.