One of former President Donald Trump’s co-defendants in the sprawling Georgia election RICO case may have violated the terms of her bond after appearing to threaten a witness in the case, legal experts say.
Trevian Kutti, a former publicist for Kanye West who was charged in the case for allegedly pressuring election worker Ruby Freeman to admit to baseless fraud allegations, appeared to threaten Freeman in a potential violation of her bond agreement during an Instagram Live session flagged by the liberal outlet Medias Touch.
"Everybody’s alive. There’s no murder weapon. As a matter of fact, there’s a woman sitting somewhere who knows this whole thing is a lie,” Kutti said in an apparent reference to Freeman. “Who knows I never did anything to her. Who knows I never. Who knows she begged me for help. There’s a woman sitting somewhere who knows that I’m going to f**k her whole life up when this is done.”
Kutti said that her conversation was on video at a police station, matching the account of her interaction with Freeman.
Legal experts expressed alarm over Kutti’s comments and predicted she could have her bond revoked or even face a second indictment.
“This is not even a close call,” tweeted Janai Nelson, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. “This whole rant by Trevian Kutti is a case study in witness intimidation and obstruction. All prosecutors in these election subversion cases must give no quarter when it comes to these antics and fully and swiftly enforce the law and the bond terms.”
Sherrilyn Ifill, the former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis “has to be all over this.”
“Shaye Moss & Ruby Freeman have been through enough. And the consent order for Trevian’s bond could not be clearer,” she wrote.
Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University, called Kutti’s comments “straight up witness intimidation that violates the conditions of her consent bond.”
Kreis predicted that prosecutors would file a motion to revoke Kutti’s consent bond and said he “would not be shocked if she’s indicted again for an additional racketeering act by the Grand Jury.”
Judge Scott McAfee, who is overseeing the case, last month modified the bond agreement of fellow co-defendant Harrison Floyd over social media posts relating to the case but stopped short of revoking his bond agreement.
But Floyd’s conduct, “though plainly stupid, is nothing when compared to what Trevian Kutti appears to have done,” Kreis wrote on X/Twitter. Though Floyd made a “very poor choice” by having limited contact with witnesses on social media, “the contact he had was limited to people who are state officials,” Kreis explained. “Under Georgia law, witness intimidation’s baseline default is physical or economic harm— mouthing off about the prosecution’s case isn’t presumptively a kind of intimidation.
“It’ll be the state’s burden to demonstrate to the court the meaning of Trevian Kutti’s statement and that it was a violation of the terms of her bond and the public interest favors remand if the state so moves,” he added. “I don’t think they’ll have a hard time with that showing here.”
