Donald Trump and his Republican allies’ failed coup attempts got an aggressive, bizarre boost from a former associate of world-famous rapper Kanye West.
The secretive, pro-Trump effort by Trevian Kutti—who appears to be the only person in the United States who bears that name, according to public records databases—was a particularly baffling Coen Brothers-style twist in a sprawling anti-democratic crusade overflowing with unlikely developments.
So, who exactly is this literally one-of-a-kind Trevian Kutti, who took a break from rubbing elbows with the Hollywood and music-industry elite so she could play a bit part in MAGAworld’s efforts to asphyxiate American democracy and keep Trump in power?
ADVERTISEMENT
For one thing, she claimed late last year to be in direct contact with one of Trump’s legal teams. She’s posted various photos of herself posing with MAGA luminaries, including the wealthy pillow magnate who personally funded pro-Trump election challenges. And once upon a time, she was a Hillary Clinton donor.
This story was first reported on this week’s episode of The Daily Beast’s podcast Fever Dreams. Listen below:
Like her former employer, Kanye West, the Chicago-based publicist had a thin record of political involvement prior to the 2020 election, when she became a pro-Trump activist and campaign manager for a QAnon-believing candidate who ran to take on John Lewis’s congressional seat after his death.
Kutti did not respond to The Daily Beast’s requests for comment.
But the former Yeezy spox now in the spotlight claims to have brushed up against senior Trump supporters like MyPillow magnate Mike Lindell and the Trump campaign’s legal team, according to a review of her social media posts by The Daily Beast.
As Reuters first reported, Kutti allegedly showed up in December of 2020 at the home of Ruby Freeman, a Georgia poll worker falsely accused by the Trump campaign and conservative activists of carrying suitcases full of fake ballots to run up Joe Biden’s vote tally in the state, and pressured her to “confess.”
Kutti, according to Reuters, told Freeman she was “a loose end for a party that needs to tidy up” and then put her on the phone with a man named “Harrison Ford” who Kutti reportedly claimed had “authoritative powers to get you protection.”
It’s unclear on whose behalf, if anyone’s, Kutti was acting when she allegedly tried to pressure Freeman into falsely confessing to voter fraud. A spokesperson for Kanye West said she “was not associated with Kanye West or any of his enterprises at the times of the facts that are reported in these articles or since these facts occurred.”
On Twitter, Kutti denied the Reuters story and said that she "was not engaged financially by anyone attempting to provide help to Ruby." Her outreach, she claimed, came at the behest of “concerned citizens” and “contacts in GA” who she said “led [her] to believe they would provide [Department of Justice] sources who could grant immunity to” Freeman.
On social media, Kutti has implied that she was in communication with Trump campaign officials around the time of the election. In a tweet from a different, since-suspended Twitter account, Kutti posted a picture of herself on the phone claiming to have received a briefing on the state’s post-election efforts to challenge Biden’s lead in the state days before news organizations officially called the state for Biden.
“Haven’t slept in days. Just talked with @realDonaldTrump legal team in #Nevada. They have been on ground all week preparing,” Kutti tweeted on Nov. 4. The Daily Beast contacted several veterans of Trump’s post-election legal teams this week, and none said they could remember her or her name.
Kutti was also photographed at the infamous June 2020 Trump rally in Oklahoma, which saw low attendance numbers. The sparsely attended event provoked Trump’s wrath at organizer Brad Parscale and may have contributed to the coronavirus exposure of former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, who died of COVID-19 shortly after attending.
Kutti is visible in photographs of the rally standing next to Oklahoma Gov Kevin Stitt while holding signs for Black Voices for Trump, a Republican pro-Trump group founded by Alveda King, a niece of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. A photo posted to Twitter also shows Kutti standing next to Lindell and his private jet en route to the rally.
Lindell, similarly, said he didn’t recognize her name, adding, “I don’t know who this person is,” after The Daily Beast sent him pictures—appearing to be selfies—of the two of them. He did suggest it was possible she was in a group that he agreed to take with him to a Trump rally.
Kutti’s involvement in politics dates back at least to 2007, when she contributed over $2000 to Democrat Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
During the 2020 election, she donated $3,000 to the Georgia congressional campaign of avowed QAnon supporter Angela Stanton King—nearly half the money raised by the campaign’s committee. Kutti also worked as Stanton King’s campaign manager until Sept. 1, 2020, according to a press release issued by the campaign.
President Trump had pardoned Stanton King, who served six months in home confinement on federal conspiracy charges for her role in a car theft ring, in February of 2020. She subsequently ran for Congress in the former district of civil rights legend Rep. John Lewis and lost to Democrat Nikema Williams, who took 85 percent of the vote.
On social media, Kutti has posted conspiracy theories about coronavirus vaccines between posts of selfies with celebrities like Julia Roberts, Sting, and Michael B. Jordan. In one recent Twitter post, she published a bogus warning to women that they should, “Be careful having sex with men who have been jabbed. That spike ‘protein’ they now produce could be the new STD.”
Kutti courted controversy early in her career, including with a controversial advertising campaign for her clothing company, G’Bani. In 2003, the Chicago boutique outraged neighbors with a window display showing simulated piles of cocaine next to razor blades and dollar bills. Kutti explained to the Chicago Tribune that the imagery was intended as an homage to the compelling appeal of the brand’s offerings: “something that people must have—an addiction.”
Before Kutti’s work as a publicist for Kanye West, she worked as a spokesperson for R. Kelly.
“It’s a very sad situation where it comes to a point where people are being deemed captive or enslaved when they’re truly free human beings,” Kutti told BuzzFeed in 2019 about allegation of rape, kidnapping, and pedophilia made against the R&B singer. “Mr. Kelly is an upstanding human being and it’s very saddening that these allegations are being orchestrated.”
A federal jury convicted Kelly of racketeering, sexual exploitation of a child, coercion, forced labor, kidnapping, and numerous violations of the Mann Act, which prohibits the transportation of women across state lines for prostitution.
This reporting was first featured on this week’s episode of Fever Dreams, a weekly Daily Beast podcast hosted by Will Sommer and Asawin Suebsaeng. The hosts were joined by Adam Rawnsley, a reporter and senior researcher at The Daily Beast.
Elsewhere on this week’s episode, the hosts and Rawnsley dig in on that PowerPoint—the one about torpedoing the country’s democratic order in order to please the former host of Celebrity Apprentice—that conveniently made its way to Trump’s then-White House chief of staff. Later, Sommer and Suebsaeng welcome guests Dan Friesen and Jordan Holmes, the hosts of the Knowledge Fight podcast, where in “each episode, Dan and Jordan take a look at some clips from that day's Alex Jones Show and struggle to make sense of what they find.”
And finally, Sommer and Suebsaeng examine what Daily Beast colleague and Fever Dreams correspondent Kelly Weill has described as “the Election Vigilantes Heading for Your Doorstep.”
Listen, and subscribe, to Fever Dreams on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher
