She Worked for a “Real Housewife.” Then She Got Indicted With Trump.

The 18 co-conspirators indicted alongside Donald Trump this week are a strange crew.

Kenneth Chesebro apparently became red-pilled through a love of cryptocurrency. Jenna Ellis pretended to be a constitutional law expert on TV. Jeffrey Clark complained of being the victim of “witches, spiritists, mediums, those with spirit animals, and Ukrainian NPCs.” And Rudy Giuliani has—well, it would be impossible to recount all of the strange things Giuliani has done. And that’s before you even get to the allegations about how all of these lawyers and advisers conspired with Trump to overturn the 2020 election.

But there is one co-conspirator who stands out for being particularly out of place among this motley group of lawyers and advisers to the former president: one of Kanye West’s former publicists, Trevian Kutti.

Until reports surfaced of her attempted interference in Georgia vote counting for the 2020 election, Kutti was much more of a presence in the world of fashion and celebrity than in politics. She was best known for working as a publicist for controversial artists (she worked, at one point, for R. Kelly, in addition to her time with Kanye West.) But by 2020, she was doing potential crimes for a former president, connected to him, per the criminal filing, by a group called Black Voices for Trump.

Kutti’s role in the indictment relates to the harassment of Fulton County election worker Ruby Freeman, whom some might remember as “Lady Ruby,” and whose testimony was played at the televised Jan. 6 committee hearings last year. (“There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere,” she testified. “Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?”) Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, were both election workers who were featured in edited viral videos that appeared, from the perspective of conspiracy theorists, to show them pulling from a suitcase of fake ballots. (The “suitcase” was standard ballot boxes; a secretive “USB drive” they were accused of suspiciously passing between them was a ginger mint.)

Both women, who testified in person last year, were targeted by Trump supporters who believed these virulent conspiracy theories, in part because both Trump and Giuliani repeatedly promoted them.

But Republicans’ treatment of Freeman went beyond lies and harassment, it seems. In the weeks after the 2020 election, according to the Georgia indictment, Kutti traveled from Chicago to Atlanta in hopes of convincing Freeman to admit that she committed election fraud. Kutti appeared at Freeman’s house, told Freeman’s neighbor she was a “crisis manager” and was there to help, and called Freeman to warn her that she was in danger. According to Reuters, Kutti told Freeman that a “high-profile individual” had sent her and that if Freeman did not confess to voter fraud, in 48 hours “people” would come to her home, and Freeman would go to jail.

If the allegations prove true, they amount to cruel and illegal scare tactics. And they’re all the more baffling because years ago, Kutti had been a Democratic donor and outspoken critic of Republicans and the Bush administration.

Perhaps the earliest article about Kutti, a 2003 Chicago Tribune article, noted a local controversy: Her luxury shoe store, G’Bani, which she opened in 1997 with her husband, had decorated its storefront with rolled-up dollar bills, white powder, and razor blades. “We’re comparing the spirit and concept of G’Bani to something that people must have—an addiction,” Kutti told the Tribune at the time. “We’re more European-based and would like to take Chicago’s mentality a little further than just Midwestern.”

The next year, Kutti stoked even greater controversy with overtly political messaging. The New York Times described eye-catching window displays in a 2006 article:

When asked about alienating potential customers, Kutti was blunt. “Our customer is not the conservative Christian right,” she told the Times.

According to the paper, the high-end fashion store—it expanded from shoes into clothing and later housewares—was stocked with items that cost thousands of dollars. A bar in the store offered Champagne and caviar. Celebrities reportedly shopped at the store. Kutti later opened a second Chicago business, Trevian, which offered the same high-end fashion. She deployed the same controversial marketing tactics in her window displays there, too.

According to a 2009 interview that Kutti did with a local Chicago design blog, Kutti used her shops as a launchpad for her celebrity styling career. She claimed she had worked for Kelly Rowland and Regina King and hinted in the interview that she was being considered for a role on a Real Housewives show. Kutti has also claimed to have represented the queen of Jordan and the boxer Terence Crawford. (A spokesperson for the queen denied “any involvement with Kutti” in a statement to Reuters.)

In 2017, according to Kutti’s LinkedIn, she started working as R. Kelly’s publicist, but she ditched him a year later following the release of the BBC documentary R. Kelly: Sex, Girls and Videotapes, which explored previously aired allegations that Kelly operated a coercive sex cult. (Kelly is currently serving 31 years in prison on charges related to racketeering and child pornography.) She claimed that at that point, she began working as a publicist for Kanye West, now known by the name Ye.

It’s unclear what, exactly, radicalized Kutti and caused her shift from Bush-era critic to Trumpian conspiracy theorist. But by her own account, working for two embattled stars—the first prosecuted for sex crimes, the second a paranoid controversy magnet who has been vocal about his avowed antisemitism—had an effect on her.

“Working with Ye and Mr. Kelly truly made me understand the amount of false accusations that can be given to strong people such as Trump,” she said in a recent statement to WBEZ Chicago. “I am no politician and have no interest in being one. I would like to quote Ye, one of my favorite people I have worked with: ‘The media is trying to crucify me like I’m Christ.’ ”

Kutti’s first known foray into politics came ahead of the 2020 elections. While it’s not known if she worked on Ye’s long-shot presidential campaign—she supported it on social media but didn’t respond to the Chicago Sun-Times’ questions on the matter—she did work as the campaign manager for Angela Stanton-King, a Real Housewives of Atlanta cast member who also happens to be a right-wing QAnon supporter who challenged the civil rights icon John Lewis for his seat in the House. (Lewis died in 2020 and Stanton-King lost by 85 percentage points of the vote to his replacement, Democrat Nikema Williams.) Stanton-King had previously served two years in prison on charges related to a car-theft criminal ring. Trump would later grant her a full pardon.

Kutti also dabbled in lobbying, campaigning in 2020 for a cannabis cultivation license for a major hemp producer called Red White and Bloom. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Kutti also lodged “a series of incendiary and profanity-laden attacks” against Toi Hutchinson, a cannabis adviser for Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who also happens to be a Black woman. “I’m going to keep my knee on Toi W. Hutchinson’s neck. Period,” Kutti wrote on Facebook in July 2020. “[She] stole every chance minorities had to access equity and prosperity in cannabis. She is a bought and paid for piece of trash, a slave and a powerless echo of those who appointed her.”

Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign got behind Ye’s political ambitions and Stanton-King’s campaigns, giving Kutti a direct connection to the White House. On Facebook, she posted an invitation she received to a White House event for Black History Month in February 2020. In June of that year, she was photographed holding a sign at one of Trump’s rallies for Black Voices for Trump.

Trump’s administration “has done more for Black people than I’ve seen in my adult life, and on issues that matter to me,” Kutti told the Sun-Times.

The conspiratorial mindset that Kutti shared with Ye—one that was also on display early in the pandemic, when she spread conspiracy theories about COVID—appeared to kick into high gear when Trump lost the election.

At some point after Election Day 2020, according to the Georgia indictment, a white police officer and Lutheran minister from Illinois named Stephen Lee asked Harrison Floyd, the executive director of Black Voices for Trump, to speak to Ruby Freeman to discuss an immunity deal for her in exchange for her willingness to admit to voter fraud. Lee apparently believed that Freeman would only trust Black people who approached her. Floyd recruited Kutti to contact Freeman, and Kutti approached Freeman with promises to help her with crisis management. She eventually met up with Freeman and Floyd at a police department precinct in Cobb County to pressure Freeman. But Freeman did not give in.

Since then, Kutti has been even more public about her extreme and incendiary views—many of which, again, are based on baseless conspiracy theories. On social media, Kutti has continued to spread QAnon-adjacent speculation and falsehoods. Her Twitter account is also full of virulent, antisemitic rants.

Even as Trump’s indictments pile up, Kutti has continued to project confidence in the former president and in her own righteousness. On Twitter shortly before the indictment she declared: “I look forward to redeeming Black women in politics by becoming Press Secretary to the 47th President of the United States @realDonaldTrump.”