Judge throws out local conservative activist’s lawsuit against Chatham elections official, police officers for civil rights violations

A federal court judge has dismissed a lawsuit brought by a local conservative activist in which she alleged that her free-speech rights were violated when two Chatham County police officers forcibly removed her from a meeting of the county’s elections board in 2023.

The activist, Beth Majeroni, was carried hands-and-feet from the meeting by the two officers after she defied the requests of the board’s chairman, Thomas Mahoney III, to vacate the podium during the meeting’s public-comment period because she’d breached meeting rules.   

Videos of incident at the board’s meeting room on Eisenhower Avenue in Savannah on July 10, 2023, went viral, and Majeroni, a retired pharmacy executive and resident of Skidaway Island, became a cause célèbre for MAGA and election-integrity activists nationwide. She was dubbed an “America First rock star.”

A year later, Majeroni sued over the incident, claiming her rights under the First, Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution were violated. Named as defendants in the suit were Mahoney, the Chatham County Board of Elections, and the two police officers, Andrew Nizwantowski and Robert Santoro. The lawsuit asked for unspecified financial damages.

Earlier this year, lawyers for the defendants asked U.S. District Court Judge Lisa Godbey Wood to throw out Majeroni’s lawsuit. On Sept. 23, she did.

‘Retaliation’

At the heart of the suit was Majeroni’s claim that Mahoney, in ruling her out of order prior to her removal, was retaliating against her for complaining that she hadn’t received elections board documents related to the 2022 primary. Majeroni had served as a volunteer poll watcher in that election, which she alleged has “irregularities.” The records were, she said, promised to her during a grand-jury proceeding she’d initiated.

But in her 58-page order, Wood says that Mahoney and the two police officers acted within their authority to stop Majeroni from continuing her remarks after she persisted in discussing the grand jury proceeding.

That violated the guidelines for the public-comment period that barred remarks of a “quasi-judicial (‘court-like’) nature” and despite warnings from Mahoney (“Ms. Majeroni, I’m going to have to ask you to sit down. This has nothing to do with our proceedings here.”)

Those guidelines were known to Majeroni. She was among those meeting attendees wishing to speak during the public-comment period who agreed to the ground rules in writing prior to the start of the meeting, Wood notes.

In her original lawsuit, Majeroni’s lawyers accused Mahoney and the two county police officers of “actual malice” and “intent to cause Majeroni harm and injury” by carrying her from the meeting room. As a result, Majeroni “suffered a loss of liberty, reputational damage, humiliation, and emotional distress.” 

Judge Wood didn’t draw the same conclusions from viewing the video of the July 10, 2023, incident, which shows Majeroni slumping to the floor just as the officers reach her side at the podium.

Citing precedent, she writes, that “when uncontroverted video evidence is available, the court should view the facts in the light depicted by the video recording.”

‘Modern-day hero’

Whether Majeroni and her lawyers — Rachel Berlin Benjamin of Beal, Sutherland, Berlin & Brown, and Jonathan Grunberg of Wade, Grunberg & Wilson — plan to appeal Wood’s decision wasn’t immediately known. Majeroni didn’t return phone calls seeking comment on the case.

But the judge’s order, at least for the time being, draws an end to a political, as well as legal, chapter in what became an incident discussed far beyond the confines of Chatham County.

In the days following July 10, 2026, Majeroni was a sought-after interview by the nation’s top conservative talk show hosts, who lionized her.

Calling her a “modern-day hero,” alt-right internet personality Stew Peters claimed that Chatham police and election officials had targeted Majeroni because she’d uncovered fraud in Georgia’s election system.

“Something has gone seriously wrong in Georgia . . . the heart of radical leftism in the South,” Peters said, as he introduced Majeroni ahead of an interview. “It’s always been a state narrowly divided between good and evil. She has been trying to restore trust in the state’s elections after that calamity in 2020, but instead, she found herself treated as a common criminal.”

“A hero and a patriot,” proclaimed Steve Bannon, the host of “War Room” and a White House strategist during the first Trump administration, after replaying the video of her elections board encounter, which he declared a sign on “the road to fascism.”

Before the year was out, Majeroni, a former president of Ladies on the Right, announced that she would challenge incumbent state Sen. Ben Watson (District 1) in the May 2024 Republican primary. The events of July 2023 became a staple of her “speak-truth-to-power” campaign. In a race that became, in part, a barometer of Establishment versus MAGA and “grassroots” strength in the district, Watson defeated Majeroni by nearly 19 percent of the vote.

Majeroni remains prolific on social media. Whether she plans to seek elected office again isn’t known.