State Senate Candidate Accused of Using Racial Slur in Recorded Conversation

On December 11, Dare County resident Richard Burrus posted a 23-second audio clip on social media that he claimed revealed former Superior Court Judge Jerry Tillett using the N-word and joking about shooting a Black man. 

Eleven days later, two State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) agents arrived at Burrus’ front door, inquiring about the source of the recording. Tillett, who is now running for state Senate in the March 3 Republican primary, had asked the district attorney to investigate. The DA called an SBI agent. 

The SBI closed its inquiry earlier this month, finding no evidence of a crime. Then Tillett, whose attorneys question the recording’s authenticity and deny that he used racial slurs, filed criminal charges against Burrus for misdemeanor stalking, citing unspecified comments he made on Facebook last May. 

The audio Burrus posted seems to feature three voices—two men and one woman—though Tillett’s attorneys claim that there are actually four. Their speech is slurred, suggesting they might have been drinking, and it sounds like they are traveling in a car. Nothing in the recording indicates when or where the conversation took place, nor are names mentioned. 

“He turned the light off!” a man exclaims at the beginning.

A younger-sounding man says, “You should have shot his Black ass.” 

“Should have shot that n—,” a male voice agrees, using the racial slur. 

“He came out so pissy,” the woman says. “I’m like, ‘What in the world?’ ‘Somebody cut the light out on me.’ I laughed all the way home from [unintelligible].”

“He thought it was funny!” a man says. 

“N—, n—, I’d have been like, n—, please,” the younger-sounding man says. 

“N—, pleeease,” a man interjects, drawing out the last word. 

“You’re 30 cents short of a quarter, turn the fucking light off on me,” the younger-sounding man continues. The recording cuts off. 

In his Facebook post, Burrus identifies one speaker as Jerry Tillett. 

“Jerry Tillett, do you remember when you violated my First Amendment rights?” Burrus wrote. “I do. Do you remember your court order to keep me off of social media? I do. Do you remember you and your family saying racist shit? I do. Here is some proof.”

Court records show that after Burrus pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of communicating threats in 2019, Tillett ordered Burrus not to post on social media “for or about judicial officers” as a term of his probation, which ended in 2024. According to Tillett’s attorney, R. Daniel Boyce, Burrus has “made other false allegations and threats against Judge Tillett,” though Boyce did not provide details. 

Burrus, 46, has a long history of making incendiary comments about local officials. A veteran of the Outer Banks service industry, Burrus says he once partied with many of the region’s power brokers and knows about the skeletons in their closets. 

“When I drop a tape, people know it’s real,” Burrus said. “You have a few people [who are] the echelon of Manteo society or Dare County society. The old, ‘We can walk around like we’re somebody, and everybody’s our servant.’ Guess what happened throughout history: The servants always knew what was going on with the royal family.” 

Through an attorney, Tillett told The Assembly that Burrus “is a serial defamer.” 

The Assembly obtained an identical version of the recording Burrus posted from a different source. The Assembly then interviewed the person who claims to have recorded it. This individual asked not to be named, citing a fear of retribution. 

This person identified the speakers as Jerry Tillett; his wife, Tanya Tillett; and their son, Jeremy Tillett. The person said the recorded conversation took place in 2016, after the “extremely intoxicated” Tilletts left Basnight’s Lone Cedar Cafe in Nags Head. 

According to this person, the Tilletts were recounting an incident that happened to Jerry Tillett in a bathroom in Norfolk, Virginia. A Black man had turned off the light as he exited, leaving Tillett alone in the dark. Tillett was livid because he thought the man had done so intentionally, the person said. 

At The Assembly’s request, this person produced a longer version of the recording, which appears to briefly include the person’s voice in the conversation as well. At one point in the longer recording, while recalling an encounter with a law enforcement officer, the younger-sounding man refers to himself as “Mr. Tillett.” This version contains the 23-second clip that The Assembly originally received and that Burrus posted.

The person also sent The Assembly a video showing the recording being played from the Voice Memo app on an iPhone. In the video, the app shows that the recording was made on April 1, 2016. Deepfake technology that could realistically mimic voices was not widely available at the time. 

Jeremy Tillett, who has also denied using a racial slur, did not respond to The Assembly’s interview requests. 

In a statement on Tillett’s website, attorney Dan Merrell said that the recording posted online has been “deceptively edited and doctored.” 

An “initial examination by experts” suggested that the recording had been “manipulated,” Boyce added in an email. He did not provide the names of these experts, nor any reports they had written showing the basis for their findings. 

“What is most important to Judge Tillett is that the public not be distracted by false and defamatory statements about a racial slur by someone else, purportedly made 10 years ago,” Boyce wrote. 

‘Agitated and Confrontational’

Like most veteran Eastern North Carolina politicians, Jerry Tillett, now 68, began his career as a Democrat. The region has shifted toward the GOP over the last two decades; Tillett switched parties after the 2012 election. 

As a young Manteo lawyer, Tillett was a close friend of and top aide to Marc Basnight, the powerful Democratic Senate leader, before Gov. Jim Hunt appointed Tillett as a special superior court judge in 1993. A year later, Dare County Democrats tapped Tillett for a vacancy in the 1st Judicial District, which includes Dare and six other eastern counties. 

Tillett held the position for the next three decades before retiring as the district’s senior resident superior court judge in May 2025. In July, he was appointed to Dare County’s elections board. In September, he quit the elections board to explore a bid for state Senate. 

Tillett made his campaign official in November. In what his news release called a “passionate address to a diverse and enthusiastic audience,” Tillett said he was “stepping forward now to defend the values, freedoms, and future of our people.”

He’s one of four Republicans campaigning in District 1, a solidly red seat that state Sen. Bobby Hanig is vacating to run for Congress.

Tillett’s leading opponent is Jay Lane, an Elizabeth City farmer who is backed by top Republicans, including Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler and state Sen. Bill Rabon, Senate leader Phil Berger’s lieutenant. Gates County Commissioner Dave Forsythe and Marine veteran Cole Johnson round out the field. 

As a judge, Tillett founded the Dare County Recovery Court, which provided individuals with substance abuse problems an alternative to incarceration. But in recent years, he’s also found himself embroiled in racially fraught controversies.

In 2021, Tillett blocked Pasquotank County from removing a Confederate monument from its courthouse. Two years later, Tillett blocked the town of Edenton from relocating its Confederate monument, saying he wanted to defer to an expected state Supreme Court decision in a similar case out of Asheville. 

The Supreme Court allowed Asheville to remove its monument in March 2024. Judge Wayland Simmons Jr. rescinded Tillett’s order in August 2025, three months after Tillett retired. Edenton’s monument quickly fell. The case in Pasquotank County is pending. 

Also in 2023, Tillett summarily convicted defense attorney Matthew Geoffrion of contempt and sentenced him to 30 days in jail, denying him a hearing or legal representation. Geoffrion had angered Tillett by accusing the judge of bias in jury selection. His Black client, Wisezah Buckman, was facing a possible death sentence from an all-white jury. 

Geoffrion spent one night in jail before being released to appeal his conviction. Buckman is currently on death row.

Outside of the 1st District, Tillett is best known for his aggressive campaign to oust the Kill Devil Hills police chief in 2010. The effort began after town police detained Tillett’s son, Jeremy, for what court records often describe as “unspecified reasons.” 

According to an account in the Outer Banks Voice, the younger Tillett was in an acquaintance’s car that the police stopped to search for drugs. Finding nothing, the cops called in the K-9 unit, but that search came up empty, too. As they left, one officer reportedly told Jeremy, “We’ll be looking for you.”

Eleven days later, Judge Tillett gathered town officials in his chambers to complain about the incident and, more broadly, the conduct of town police. Court records described him as “agitated” and “confrontational,” and participants said they felt threatened. 

Tillett’s feud escalated into demands for personnel records, threats to arrest the district attorney, and other actions that the Judicial Standards Commission determined “fell outside of the legitimate exercise of the powers of his office.”

The commission publicly reprimanded Tillett in 2013. Two years later, the State Bar filed its own complaint against Tillett, but the state Supreme Court blocked the bar from taking action, ruling that it could not discipline sitting judges.

‘I Don’t Hear It’

Tillett’s attorneys have argued that the recording has been manipulated, without specifying how or by whom. Boyce did not provide additional information about an “initial examination” by experts that he said indicated that the audio had been altered. Instead, he said the recording had “gaps where edits could have been made,” though he did not identify them.

The attorneys have also disputed that the recording captures Tillett making racist comments. 

Boyce wrote in an email that none of the voices uttering the racial slur belongs to the former judge, a fact “confirmed” by “numerous individuals” who know him. (None were named.) 

“From initial examinations,” Boyce wrote, “one short statement in the audio that might be Judge Tillett’s voice is not a threatening statement, and it is not a racial statement.” He did not identify which statement was Tillett’s. 

Boyce argued that the recording contains three male voices, not two. He also claimed that there are two versions of the recording online, though he did not say where the second version could be located or how it was different from the one Burrus posted and The Assembly obtained. 

Boyce did not respond to a follow-up request for additional information and answers to specific questions.

In one respect, Boyce’s explanation appears to be at odds with what District Attorney Jeff Cruden says Tillett told him when Tillett asked him to investigate potential wiretapping. 

Tillett told Cruden that he wanted to know how the audio was obtained, since the recording contained only three voices—those of Tillett, his wife, and his son—and none of them recorded it, Cruden said.

Cruden said that he has known Tillett since at least 1994, when Cruden was an assistant district attorney, and he’s appeared before Tillett countless times. 

Cruden told The Assembly that he recognized Tillett’s voice on the recording. But Tillett insisted that parts of the audio had to have been manipulated because he hadn’t made any racist comments. 

“I hear him in portions of the tape,” Cruden told The Assembly. “I hear [racial slurs], but I don’t hear it coming from Jerry Tillett. But I’m not an expert.” 

Cruden called SBI Special Agent Mike Farrell and asked him to look into an “allegation of an illegal electronic recording,” according to SBI spokesperson Chad Flowers. Farrell conducted what Flowers described as a “preliminary assessment,” but Farrell never opened a case file or kept records of his interviews. 

Nothing came of those interviews, in any event. Burrus refused to answer questions when agents came to his house on December 22. Over the next two weeks, Flowers said, agents attempted to talk to two or three more people they thought might have information about the recording, with the same result. By January 6, the investigation was closed. 

It’s not clear why Tillett believes the recording is the product of illegal wiretapping. It almost certainly is not. North Carolina is a one-party consent state, meaning that only one person involved in a conversation has to consent for the recording to be legal. 

In the longer version of the recording obtained by The Assembly, the person who claims to have recorded the audio appears to be a participant in the conversation. 

If that’s the case, the recording was legal, said Phil Dixon, a law professor at the UNC School of Government.

Dixon said a recording’s legality hinges on whether the people being recorded had a reasonable expectation of privacy. 

If two people are speaking in a private place or on the phone, and a third person records the conversation surreptitiously, that person could be found guilty of illegal wiretapping, which is a felony, Dixon said. But if they’re speaking in a public space such as a cafeteria, another person can legally record them. And if they’re in a car, it’s not a crime for someone else in the vehicle to record.

‘Abusing, Annoying, and Harassing’

The day after SBI agents came to Burrus’ house, Tillett’s attorneys sent him a cease-and-desist letter, Burrus said. Burrus said he burned it. 

That same day, December 23, the right-wing website National File—founded by Alex Jones, of InfoWars fame—published an article that claimed to confirm the legitimacy of the recording, after learning that the SBI “is investigating the origins of the audio.” It posted the audio with captions that assigned each line to its purported speaker.

National File reported that, when a reporter reached Jeremy Tillett by phone, he first claimed that the recording was “illegally obtained,” then said AI was used to manipulate it, and then threatened to sue “anybody who publishes it.” Finally, he reportedly said, “That’s not even me,” referring to the voices in the recording.

In text messages included in the National File article, Jerry Tillett told a reporter, “I don’t know who you are or what you are talking about, however, I intend to take all appropriate legal action.”

The National File article also included thinly sourced gossip about Tillett and other prominent people in Dare County, including Jennifer Karpowicz Bland, a former prosecutor and district court judge. Bland is representing Jeremy Tillett in litigation against his ex-wife. (National File publisher Noel Fritsch told The Assembly that Tillett’s lawyers have threatened to sue his publication.) 

On January 5, Bland pressed a misdemeanor charge against Burrus for cyberstalking. According to the criminal summons that Bland swore against him, Burrus repeatedly made “annoying” and “harassing” Facebook comments about Bland on May 1, 2025. The summons contains no examples. 

Burrus said he doesn’t remember what he wrote that day, or on what pages he posted. He admitted that he likely mocked Bland, who prosecuted the 2019 case against him, as she left the district attorney’s office for private practice. 

It’s unclear why Bland waited seven months to file charges. Bland did not respond to interview requests. 

On January 10, Jerry Tillett pressed a misdemeanor stalking charge against Burrus. Tillett alleged that on May 10, 2025, Burrus posted false accusations of “illegal and improper conduct and racial comments on repeated multiple sites on between 25 and 100 occasions.” 

Like Bland, he offered no examples, and it’s not clear why he waited so long to act on it. 

Two days later, on January 12, Bland pressed a second charge against Burrus, accusing him of posting to Facebook “for the purpose of abusing, annoying, [and] harassing” her after being served with the first criminal summons. 

Again, Bland’s summons provided no examples of the offending posts, but a review of Burrus’ Facebook page presents a few possibilities. 

From January 10: “I have not been arrested for cyberstalking,” Burrus told his followers. “I just got a summons [taken] out by someone named in a news article I shared. That’s all. If you know about corruption in our judicial system, then you know what is really going on.”

Another post, on January 8, which appears to be referring to Bland: “When the most hated woman in Eastern N.C. politics comes after you, you know you’ve done the right thing.” 

“I haven’t posted anything with her name,” Burrus told The Assembly. “So I don’t know how she would get that.” 

Burrus was arrested on January 12 and posted three separate bonds of $3,000, according to court records. He’s scheduled to appear in court in February. 

‘I’m Not a Bad Guy’

Jerry Tillett’s attorneys have threatened “heavy legal consequences” for anyone “making false and defamatory statements” about their client. In particular, they’ve sought to discredit Burrus, whom they’ve portrayed as unstable. 

Through his attorney, Tillett pointed The Assembly to a salacious comment that Burrus recently made on Facebook that appears to be about Cruden’s son. That’s “similar to what he did to me,” Tillett said. “It is a pattern of making up similar defamatory statements and even using false names to post them on social media.” (The comment about Cruden’s son was not posted under a false name.) 

Without naming Burrus, the statement on Tillett’s website points out that he pleaded guilty to communicating threats in 2019, which led Tillett to ban him from posting on social media about judicial officers. Burrus also pleaded guilty to several counts of communicating threats in 2014. 

In that case, the statement says, Burrus told his mother that he would “blow her head off.”

Burrus acknowledged that he pleaded guilty to threatening his mother, though he told The Assembly his comments weren’t directed at her. 

“I got drunk, I got fucked up, and I did some really stupid shit,” Burrus said. “I know I’m a little socially awkward. But I’m not a bad guy, and I do tell the truth.”

Burrus said that Tillett’s attacks on his credibility don’t make the audio he posted any less real. But he’s wondering whether he’ll be arrested again when he shares this article on social media—though that won’t stop him. 

“Somebody’s got to speak up,” he said. “They’re doing it to the wrong person. Because I don’t care.”