Shouting Terrorist in a Crowded Grocery Store

On Halloween 2024, right-wing activist Sloan Rachmuth was checking out at a Holly Springs Harris Teeter when she spotted an employee wearing a keffiyeh, a traditional head covering often associated with Palestinians. 

Rachmuth, who is Jewish and a self-described Zionist, confronted her. She later explained in a legal filing that she found it “deeply upsetting” to see someone wearing “the symbol of a terrorist organization dedicated to eradicating people like me,” referring to Hamas. 

The employee told police that Rachmuth “began yelling at her and calling her a terrorist due to her wearing a hijab,” according to court records. Rachmuth described the conversation more mildly. She said the employee told her she’d purchased the keffiyeh on Shein in support of “Free Palestine.” 

What happened next isn’t in dispute: After a store manager asked her to leave, Rachmuth posted photos of the employee to her X account, which has more than 55,000 followers. Tagging Harris Teeter’s corporate account, Rachmuth called the employee a “Hamas sympathizer.” In the comments, she specified the location where the employee worked. 

Court records indicate that several of Rachmuth’s followers called the store and demanded to know why it hired terrorists. The employee told police she was so frightened that she stopped going to work and pulled her kids from school. 

Three days later, Holly Springs police arrested Rachmuth at her Apex home and charged her with cyberstalking, a misdemeanor. Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman dropped the charge the next day. Freeman told The Assembly that the “evidence of the case did not meet the statutory definition of the crime.” 

In April 2025, Rachmuth, whose attorney declined to make her available for an interview, filed a federal lawsuit against the three officers who arrested her, alleging “malicious prosecution” and saying they violated her First Amendment rights.

“The post did not threaten the employee in any way or include the employee’s name, and it was not directed to the employee,” her attorney, Daniel Bruce, told The Assembly in a statement. “That is plainly protected speech—not cyberstalking.”

Holly Springs, which is defending the officers in court, says they are protected by qualified immunity, the legal principle that police aren’t liable for actions performed in the line of duty unless they violate a “clearly established” constitutional right. An attorney for the town declined to comment.

A judge could decide the case in the coming months. 

The General Assembly passed the cyberstalking statute in 2000, a time before social media drove civic discourse. It bans repeated online communications “for the purpose of abusing, annoying, threatening, terrifying, harassing, or embarrassing any person.” It exempts nonthreatening political speech, but police and magistrates are left to decide what qualifies. 

Cyberstalking charges aren’t common, and convictions are rare. Many cases likely involve things like threats and abusive comments from jilted paramours, said Jeffrey Welty, a professor of public law and government at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Government. 

But Welty said that over the last year, he’s heard from several magistrates and judges struggling with the First Amendment implications of cyberstalking cases. 

“There are a lot of people who have nasty things said about them online who want a remedy,” Welty said. “Maybe they could file a lawsuit for libel, but that feels like a pretty slow-moving train. The more expedient approach is to try to take out criminal charges. It’s bubbling up all over.”

Whatever the outcome, Rachmuth’s lawsuit raises crucial questions that courts are grappling with across the country: What’s the line between an internet asshole and a criminal? And will attempts to regulate decency inevitably stifle dissent? 

“Free speech comes with some sharp elbows and rough edges,” Welty said. “These are really deep questions about personal freedoms in the state and free expression and the kind of society that we want to live in.”

The Provocateur

Long before her arrest, Rachmuth had a reputation as a political provocateur. She was a fierce early critic of critical race theory and fomented the deceptive claim that the state’s medical schools were pushing gender transitions on toddlers. 

She also assailed anything she perceives as antisemitic, including politicians and institutions that question Israel’s policies in Gaza. Last year, Rachmuth insinuated that one of Vice President JD Vance’s aides is a “vile bigot” because he’s Tucker Carlson’s son and, according to her, antisemitism runs in the family.

Vance responded that he has “zero tolerance for scumbags attacking my staff.”

In 2024, Rachmuth shifted from activist to operative, managing Michele Morrow’s insurgent primary campaign for state education superintendent. Morrow—a far-right candidate who had promoted QAnon slogans and called for the killings of prominent Democrats—won a stunning primary victory but lost in the general election. Rachmuth, who calls herself a “primary specialist,” did not run that part of the campaign. 

Holly Springs police didn’t appear to know about any of that. They never interviewed Rachmuth and took only a cursory glance at her social media. According to the officers’ depositions, they also had no experience with cyberstalking and never considered whether Rachmuth’s post about the Harris Teeter employee fell under its political exemption. 

Elliot Warren Jr., a rookie patrolman who investigated the case, testified that he couldn’t recall whether he knew about the exemption. Benjamin Marino, who supervised Warren’s investigation, admitted that he didn’t.

To them, the evidence was straightforward: After Rachmuth called the employee a “Hamas sympathizer” on X, the store received “multiple phone calls accusing them of hiring a terrorist,” and the employee “felt terrified, harassed, and embarrassed by the post,” according to court filings. 

In the officers’ view, Rachmuth’s responses to comments met the statute’s requirement of “repeated” communications. The officers “reasonably concluded that the purpose of [Rachmuth’s] post was to terrify, harass, or embarrass the employee,” the town argued. 

Lt. Melissa Ottaway, who oversaw the patrol division, said she was surprised that Freeman dropped the charge without consulting the police. 

“Over the course of 23 years,” Ottaway wrote in a court filing, “I have had many major investigations go through the Wake County District Attorney’s Office, and some low-level citations, like traffic offenses, have been dismissed, but none have been dismissed so quickly. … I do not recall having criminal charges for which a warrant was issued dismissed without at least some message to the investigating officer.”

In her lawsuit, Rachmuth said her arrest exacerbated her preexisting post-traumatic stress. She also claimed that the ensuing publicity effectively ended her career as a political consultant. 

“My mugshot was everywhere, and I had been told that a particular candidate or two would’ve hired me, but … in a primary, they could not afford any controversy around the campaign,” Rachmuth said. 

The Judge

In Dare County, another dispute has tested the line between free speech and harassment. 

Last December, Richard Burrus posted an audio recording on his Facebook page that he said was of former Superior Court Judge Jerry Tillett using the N-word and joking about killing a Black man. 

Burrus was well-known for vituperative Facebook comments and nasty personal attacks, and he had a particular beef with Tillett. In 2019, after Burrus pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of communicating threats, Tillett ordered Burrus not to post on social media “for or about judicial officers” as a condition of his probation. Burrus believed this violated his First Amendment rights. 

Tillett, a Republican who is running for state Senate and was tapped last month to finish the remainder of the current senator’s term, denied the recording’s legitimacy. As The Assembly reported, Tillett asked the State Bureau of Investigation to probe the recording’s origins, but agents closed their inquiry without evidence that a crime had been committed. 

Tillett sued Burrus and several others for defamation in February, a month before the primary. By then, Burrus was facing several criminal charges related to online comments he made about Tillett and the judge’s allies. 

Jennifer Karpowicz Bland, a former prosecutor and district court judge who represents Tillett’s son in litigation against his ex-wife, filed a cyberstalking charge against Burrus on January 5. Bland told a magistrate that Burrus made “annoying” and “harassing” Facebook comments about her in May 2025. (North Carolina is one of a handful of states that permit citizens to initiate criminal charges.) The criminal summons did not say what those comments were, and Bland didn’t specify them in an email to The Assembly. 

Bland said she “tried to ignore [Burrus’] personal attacks, but there comes a point where enough is enough. I knew it wasn’t going to stop until I did something.”

On January 10, Tillett charged Burrus with stalking, a more serious misdemeanor, alleging that on May 10, 2025, Burrus had posted “false accusations of illegal and improper conduct and racial comments.” The charging document did not detail the accusations or say why Tillett waited seven months to complain. The same magistrate who approved Bland’s charge signed off on it. 

Burrus was arrested and released on a $6,000 secured bond.

On January 12, Bland pressed a second cyberstalking charge against Burrus, accusing him of posting about her on Facebook four days earlier. Burrus was again arrested and released on another $3,000 bond. 

The warrant didn’t specify what Burrus wrote, but he posted on Facebook that day: “When the most hated woman in Eastern N.C. politics comes after you, you know you’ve done the right thing.” The post did not name Bland directly, but she told The Assembly it was clear from the context who he meant. 

On March 13, Republican activist and Tillett supporter Christina Williams also charged Burrus with stalking. She alleged that, on December 28, 2025, he made statements on Facebook “suggesting she was unfit for her professional activities” and posted “defamatory comments on photographs she had taken at public events.” She also said he used artificial intelligence to create an image of her stealing the campaign sign of one of Tillett’s opponents. 

“The charges I filed were totally different and independent of [Bland’s and Tillett’s],” Williams told The Assembly in an email, “and they had nothing to do with me filing them.”

Williams said she planned to accuse Burrus of cyberstalking, but the magistrate—the same one who signed the other warrants—upgraded the charge to stalking because of the other cases against him. Burrus was arrested for the third time in two months and given a $6,000 bond. 

A prosecutor dismissed all of the charges in July. “The defendant’s conduct, while provocative and distasteful, is not covered by this state’s stalking or cyberstalking statutes,” the prosecutor wrote. 

The charges cost Burrus $1,500 in bail payments. He said the ordeal sent him back to therapy. “They practically kicked down my bedroom door to come get me the last time,” he said. 

Bland sent The Assembly a 52-page PDF of screenshots of Burrus’ Facebook posts and comments, which include crude attacks on Williams’ and Bland’s appearance and one in which he said that Tillett looks like ”a coked-up Boss Hog.” 

“The First Amendment does not give someone unlimited permission to target another person repeatedly with false accusations, harassment, or other unlawful conduct,” Bland wrote. 

Williams said she resented the prosecutor lumping her case in with the others, and she believes Burrus is “mentally unstable and dangerous.” Tillett and his attorney did not respond to requests for comment. 

The Law

Over the last 11 years, North Carolina’s district courts processed an average of about 1,400 cyberstalking charges a year. Only 11% ended in a conviction or guilty plea, compared with 27% for other non-vehicular misdemeanors, according to The Assembly’s analysis of N.C. Administrative Office of the Courts data. 

One possible reason cyberstalking cases are dismissed more often than other misdemeanors: The statute’s ambiguous language makes it difficult to enforce. The law doesn’t define the terms “annoy” and “embarrass,” and cops and magistrates must guess what’s free speech and what’s a crime.

“Police officers may not know up front what is constitutionally protected or not,” said Eugene Volokh, the Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a leading First Amendment scholar. “They are not constitutional experts.”

The confusion might be self-perpetuating. Neither the state Supreme Court nor the Court of Appeals has reviewed the cyberstalking statute, perhaps because the lack of successful prosecutions means cases haven’t reached them. But it also means that law enforcement officials lack judicial clarity, which leads to more dubious cases and quick dismissals. 

However, another state Supreme Court decision hints that the law’s prohibition on annoying and embarrassing communications might not pass muster. In 2016, the court unanimously struck down part of a cyberbullying statute, ruling that “it is hardly clear that teenagers require protection via the criminal law from online annoyance.”

Freeman, the Wake County district attorney, acknowledged that the words “embarrass” and “annoy” are subjective, but she pointed to the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous comment about evaluating obscenity: “I know it when I see it.” 

“Almost all of us would be able to look at certain statements or posts and identify them as being so clearly, egregiously likely to embarrass or annoy the victim that we could assert they meet the intent of the statute,” Freeman wrote in an email. “However, to preserve our freedom of speech, there is a lot of ground between something that might be rude or inappropriate and what someone can actually be held criminally responsible for.”

Volokh said there are clear cases when the government can limit speech. It can punish threats and harassing messages sent to a person, while spreading falsehoods can lead to litigation. 

“But speech that just expresses opinions about someone or that conveys true information about someone is protected, even if it’s embarrassing, even if it’s intended to embarrass, even if it’s intended to annoy,” Volokh said. “I don’t think there is a First Amendment exception for harassment or abuse.”

The Rule

For her lawsuit to prevail, Rachmuth must show not only that she was wrongfully arrested, but that no “reasonably competent officer” would have arrested her. That’s the qualified immunity standard, and it’s a steep hurdle. 

Holly Springs’ attorneys pointed out in court filings that the officers first consulted with their more experienced superiors then got approval from a magistrate. They argued that the magistrate’s decision to sign the arrest warrant should foreclose Rachmuth’s lawsuit. 

They also asked how officers were supposed to understand the law’s First Amendment implications if the state’s courts haven’t grappled with them.

“Because of the lack of case law interpreting North Carolina’s cyberstalking statute, specifically the carve-out for constitutionally protected speech, it would not be reasonable to expect the officers to know exactly what types of speech might fall under that exception,” they wrote. 

But Rachmuth’s attorneys said the cops shouldn’t have needed a court decision to figure out that her post was political. They also argued that it was obvious that Rachmuth’s post was about the incident and not directed to the employee—and that, too, should have headed off her arrest.

In 2018, the Court of Appeals vacated a man’s stalking convictions because his social media messages weren’t sent to the woman in question. (Earlier this year, the appeals court revoked a no-contact order—obtained by a former political candidate against a critic—on similar grounds.) 

But it’s not clear whether that ruling applies to cyberstalking; the statute doesn’t specify that the subject of the messages has to be the one who receives them.

Volokh said these issues have become increasingly common nationwide over the last decade. Keyboard activists target people they believe are antisemitic, racist, sexist, transphobic, or too “woke,” and pile on. Sometimes their targets are public figures or prominent businesspeople; other times, they stock grocery shelves. 

“You could imagine a world in which we say, ‘You can talk about the issue, you can talk about political figures, but don’t talk about ordinary people,’” he said. “That’s just not our First Amendment rule. Statements of opinion, however assholish they might be, are, generally speaking, constitutionally protected.”