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Michael Rothstein
Carolyn “Birdlady” Freeman sat in her familiar season-ticket perch on Nov. 3 at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, where the Atlanta Falcons superfan had maintained status as a seat-license holder for years. Dressed in the Birdlady regalia that had made her a local celebrity — a white feathered costume trimmed in red and black, shiny silver gloves, long white boots — everything about Freeman and her unsettling “hooty-hoo” cheer seemed designed to draw attention.
Only this time, the attention wasn’t so welcome. During the second quarter, stadium security motioned for her to exit her third-row seat in Section 116. They escorted her upstairs, then placed her under arrest. After a visit to the Atlanta Police precinct inside the stadium, she was transferred to the Fulton County Jail and booked for felony theft by deception. On Jan. 9, District Attorney Fani T. Willis filed a single-count accusation, the equivalent of an indictment but not involving a grand jury.
This is a buyer-beware saga of tailgates gone awry, of disgruntled football partiers who say they paid big money for pregame blowouts that failed to materialize. The charges against Freeman, alleging she collected more than $14,000 for services she failed to deliver, represent the first criminal case to emerge after several public complaints involving her over several years.
Freeman, in more than three hours of interviews with ESPN before Willis filed the accusation, insisted these were all misunderstandings and that her intentions were good. She cited exhaustion and a wide-ranging series of health issues as factors contributing to the customer dissatisfaction but insisted nothing nefarious happened.
The federal status of her Birdlady Cares Inc. nonprofit lent credibility to her well-publicized business and charitable works, former clients said. But a complaint filed with the Internal Revenue Service alleges Freeman abused that status for fraudulent business purposes — something she denies.
The Falcons won’t discuss her case. Freeman said the Falcons recently sent her a cease-and-desist letter regarding the unauthorized use of the team’s trademarked logo and images. Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Freeman said, sent her a letter citing the in-stadium arrest as the basis for suspending her season pass and seat license privileges.
The Birdlady’s fame in Atlanta, which included a proclamation from the city and having her image featured on a big Equifax billboard in the stadium, has taken a sharp turn for the worse. But Freeman vows to fight back and beat the charges. She has yet to secure a private attorney and has been represented by a public defender since her arrest.
THE CRIMINAL CASE that caused Freeman’s world to come crashing down involves a tailgate party ahead of a Sept. 22 prime-time game in Atlanta between the Falcons and Kansas City Chiefs. Two months before the game, Chiefs fans Tammy Southwood and Catherine Baskett-Cook contacted Freeman for help organizing an event for hundreds of fellow fans. Freeman responded with an array of ideas about services she could offer: A decorated event space, a tent, food and beverages, live entertainment, games, a projection screen broadcasting games, golf-cart shuttle service and a “surprise celebrity guest performance.”
The two sides signed a contract, after which the Chiefs fans said they transferred $14,000 to Freeman incrementally through various payment providers. When game day arrived and Chiefs fans started gathering at the venue, there were no signs of Freeman or preparations for the tailgate aside from the presence of a few crew members standing by.
It was “basically a deserted lot surrounded by a neighborhood,” said Blair Quasnitschka, who purchased tailgate tickets from Freeman. “There’s other Chiefs fans there, obviously all through the same connection. But it’s vacant.”
Southwood and Baskett-Cook, who are both listed as witnesses in the court action against Freeman, cited an exchange of emails that stipulated preparations would begin around noon that day. But when the 3 p.m. start time arrived with hundreds of fans gathered, there was still no sign of Freeman or the party supplies.
Baskett-Cook said she phoned Freeman, who responded with a litany of excuses for why she was running late, including a broken trailer and a hospital stay the evening before the game because she had passed out trying to load the trailer. She said she had been stopped by police while heading to the venue.
Their description of Freeman’s rapid-fire array of excuses resembled her responses during her ESPN interviews. Her responses were riddled with inconsistencies and difficult-to-follow meanderings.
Various tailgate organizers and ticket holders said they placed calls to Freeman, but they went straight to voicemail. Baskett-Cook said she spoke with Freeman multiple times that day, and each time, Freeman assured her that she was a half hour away. Just hang on.
“I just need to know when you’re going to be here,” Baskett-Cook recalled telling Freeman the last time they spoke, around 3:30 p.m. “Share your location, do whatever you need to do. You are under a contract.”
Freeman didn’t show. Ticket holders started demanding a refund.
Baskett-Cook said she waited until 6 p.m. before leaving for the game and sending a message telling Freeman she was in breach of contract. During the first half, Baskett-Cook said she started receiving bizarre reports: Freeman was inside the stadium, in full “Birdlady” regalia.
Freeman acknowledged to ESPN that she did appear at the stadium, though she said it was late in the game. After listing the excuses for her tardiness, Freeman said she ultimately arrived at the tailgate, but it was after her clients had left.
She said frozen food and nonperishable items for the tailgate were stored at her house in Macon, Georgia. She sent ESPN photos of moldy, clearly expired food items that she said were purchased for the tailgate. The Chiefs fans were welcome to retrieve them whenever they liked. Or she could throw them another tailgate.
“They took [an arrest] warrant based on a lie, saying they had a contract,” Freeman said. “They didn’t have a contract.”
She cited her friendship with Baskett-Cook as the reason she proceeded with the tailgate despite her assertion that the contract was canceled.
Because the amount exchanged between the tailgate organizers and Freeman totaled more than $1,500, it pushed the case over the legal threshold from small-claims to an alleged felony.
That’s how the Birdlady, feathers and all, wound up leaving Mercedes-Benz Stadium in handcuffs.
DAYS BEFORE FREEMAN’S ARREST, Chiefs fans told a reporter for television station Atlanta News First that they had filed an official fraud complaint with the Atlanta Police Department. The news was all over social media. Yet Freeman told ESPN that she attended the Nov. 3 game unaware of the arrest warrant.
Police said they tried contacting Freeman by phone multiple times but got no answer. They visited her Macon house to execute the warrant, knocking repeatedly at the door. They even did a welfare check at a hospital. They finally decided to try the place where she is known best: at the stadium.
Freeman described the embarrassing arrest as “cruel and malicious.”
She said the allegations were meritless because the contract had been voided when the tailgate leadership changed weeks before the event. She acknowledged being late, citing various reasons, including blaming assistants for not doing their jobs. Freeman said she showed up at the tailgate venue closer to the 8:20 p.m. kickoff — hours after the tailgate’s scheduled start time. By then, the Chiefs fans had already left.
She said various payment services gave refunds to fans who requested them. And the offer still stood to put on a substitute tailgate or let the fans retrieve the items stored in her house.
Freeman often posted on social media about her charitable work in the community, with player foundations and as an unofficial fan ambassador to the city. But the latest allegations are hardly the first complaints that she had failed to deliver on promises.
Freeman denied the other allegations as well.
Did all those cases boil down to a series of misunderstandings or something more systematic?
Baskett-Cook also asserted in an Internal Revenue Service complaint that Freeman had abused Birdlady Cares’ 501(c)(3) nonprofit status.
The contract they signed with her listed Birdlady Cares as the “caterer.” Nonprofit status meant the revenue Freeman generated was exempt from federal income tax. The IRS declined to comment on Baskett-Cook’s complaint.
THE GEORGIA SEA HAWKERS, a Seattle Seahawks fan group in Atlanta, was trying to organize a tailgate ahead of the 2017 Falcons-Seahawks divisional playoff game, Anna Peterson, the group’s president, said she had heard that Freeman was someone who could make it happen.
Peterson said Freeman offered an impressive package: a venue, food, alcohol, security and a limited number of parking spots. There would even be a kids’ zone.
Peterson did not, however, sign a contract. “It sounded, honestly now I know, way too good to be true, but it sounded great,” she recalled.
Days before the tailgate, Peterson received a call saying Freeman’s credit cards to make purchases for food and alcohol weren’t working. If the Sea Hawkers wanted the items on time, Peterson would have to send assistance. Peterson said she enlisted Gamba Stewart, another Sea Hawkers member, to help.
He recounted trips to Restaurant Depot for food, Costco for liquor — all charged to his own credit card — which he handed over to Freeman the day before. He handed these items over Stewart said he never understood why this was his job since the Sea Hawkers already had sent Freeman thousands of dollars to do the same thing.
On game day, Stewart and Peterson arrived early to help set up the venue, which turned out to be a seedy-looking parking area in a dilapidated neighborhood. As patrons arrived, there was no food. No liquor. No Freeman.
Seahawks fans, including Stewart, went to gas stations and Walmart to buy as much beer as they could to satiate annoyed fans.
Freeman’s food preparers were supposed to begin at 7:30 a.m. ahead of patrons’ arrival at 11:30 a.m. When Freeman’s workers arrived around 12:30 p.m., they didn’t bring the items Stewart had purchased. The food consisted of cold cuts instead of a full barbecue spread. Drink service, Peterson said, didn’t start until after 2 p.m. and was not what Stewart remembered purchasing. By then, most fans had left for the game.
Peterson said she was unable to obtain a refund through the online payment service she originally used.
“I paid 25 to stand here????? WTF,” one email to Peterson said. Calls flooded in for refunds or payments for services that Freeman was supposed have covered.
Freeman said she doesn’t understand the Sea Hawkers’ complaints. There was a tailgate, she said, and “everybody had a wonderful time.”
Freeman alleged the Sea Hawkers still owe the tailgate parking lot more than $3,000 for nonpayment and that she had only received one payment — “a little over $3,000” — for what she described as a $10,000 tailgate.
Peterson provided email exchanges with the parking lot service explaining payment was Freeman’s responsibility. The parking lot company told Peterson they would address it with Freeman.
Peterson said she consulted with attorneys but, without a contract, there was little she could do. Instead, she wrote a letter to Freeman outlining payments made and what went unfulfilled. In all, Peterson said the Sea Hawkers spent $6,826.93. She said the fans had an experience to remember — for all the wrong reasons.
“People still refer to it as the trap-house tailgate,” Peterson said.
WHAT’S TRUE OR NOT about Freeman’s background is difficult to decipher.
She was born in 1959 and grew up the daughter of a minister in Forsyth, Georgia. Her LinkedIn page says she attended Mercer University.
She was employed as a sheriff’s deputy in the early 1980s, although the dates she provided don’t match those from the sheriff’s office. She told ESPN she was “a sharpshooter” and “had to prove herself” as a Black female sheriff’s deputy.
On her LinkedIn page, she says she was a juvenile specialist and crime-scene photographer working in “all aspects of law enforcement,” including having Georgia Bureau of Investigation training as a juvenile specialist and crime-scene photographer in 1980 and 1981.
The GBI said it has no records of Freeman receiving those certifications.
She also claimed to be licensed or certified by the FBI National Academy Associates as a juvenile specialist and CSI photographer. Riley Moran, director of marketing and communications, said the nonprofit, nongovernmental group “does not offer licenses nor do we offer certificates in those areas.”
Freeman responded that she took the necessary classes. She did not provide documentation.
Freeman listed a job as a specialist and claims adjuster for State Farm from 1984 until 1988. It is the last full-time job listed on her LinkedIn page, where she lists her work experience since then as the Superfan Atlanta Birdlady, calling herself “The # 1 Winged Super Uber Fan with The Sparkling-Glittered-Rhinestone Smiling Face.”
Freeman said she fell “about 42 feet” off a one-story rooftop while on an inspection job for State Farm when she was 27, in June 1987. She said she spent the next decade in and out of hospitals in Macon and Atlanta, had at least 17 surgeries and that she was “an inpatient at Emory for over three years.”
She claims she was pronounced dead four times. She told ESPN she has suffered from low blood pressure, asthma, breathing issues, low blood sugar, a prior stroke, heart issues and depression.
She describes herself as a medical miracle. “They just don’t understand, I should be brain-dead. I shouldn’t be able to walk or sit up by myself or even feed myself,” Freeman told the “American Sports History” podcast in 2022. “But I just believe in mind over matter, and I don’t have to accept what the doctor says.”
Freeman said her insurance eventually ran out. She had been on long-term disability from her rooftop fall, then Social Security Disability Insurance kicked in. She said disability checks do not fund her Birdlady lifestyle nor are keeping her financially afloat.
“It’s not like I don’t eat if I don’t get that check,” Freeman said. “It’s just not like that. So I can afford to do these things.”
In different interviews over the years, she had cited the post-injury comeback of former Falcons running back William Andrews as inspiration for her to recover and shed her wheelchair, crutches and braces. She also mentioned a brief encounter with running back Jamal Anderson involving an impromptu dance she performed.
Anderson told ESPN he was aware of the Birdlady but didn’t recall the encounter she cited. He said her recollection seemed “plausible,” adding, “My experience is that she has been a great fan, and she has been great energy for the Falcons.”
Macon television station WMGT’s news reports have labeled her the “unofficial team mascot.” In 2013, Freeman went on WMGT to show off her wardrobe. The station gave her generous airtime to solicit donations so she could take trips for award ceremonies she claimed would honor her fandom — one at the What-A-Fan conference in Orlando, Florida, and another at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. She made a similar appeal in a video filmed by the Macon Telegraph.
“I’ll take all the money you got,” she said in the Telegraph video.
Freeman told ESPN she had never asked for money to fund her Birdlady lifestyle and most of what she receives for herself and the nonprofit comes from donations or in-kind gifts. When asked about the 2013 interviews, Freeman initially claimed she didn’t remember, having suffered a stroke. She then claimed there was confusion with a sponsor who fell through.
Minutes later, she acknowledged, “OK, I’m sorry. I did it. You’re right.” She also claimed she didn’t receive any money from those appeals.
“Nope,” she said. “Not one penny.”
Regarding her charitable work, online videos show her at various toy and clothing drives. Multiple organizations for which she listed doing work confirmed she assisted them with appearances and donations.
“Everything that I know of her,” said Beatrice McGuire, a Birdlady Cares board member, was that Freeman “has a really big, huge heart for helping people.”
ONE OF FREEMAN’S group-travel promotions on Facebook caught Nicolea Washington’s attention back in 2017, when the Falcons were facing the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl in Houston. Washington said she already had a game ticket but was looking for transportation and lodging.
Freeman’s Facebook ad posted multiple package-trip options: A bus leaving Feb. 1, 2017, at 8 p.m. for $370 and one leaving Feb. 3, 2017, at midnight for $425, which Washington remembered purchasing. Both offered, among other things, round-trip bus fares, a hotel for “five days, four nights,” event transportation, a private “celebrity cruise,” and a Lil Wayne and Friends Super Bowl Party.
The ad also offered a $5,900 package that included a ticket to the game, airfare, four nights of lodging, a rental car and potential VIP add-ons, including a one-hour massage ($65), a personal photo shoot ($20) and dinner at popular Cajun restaurant Pappadeaux’s ($15).
The ad listed SYTI Events as offering the trip packages. Since the Birdlady’s Facebook page was promoting it, Washington said, she trusted it enough to buy a bus trip package.
When the travel day came, she and multiple other Falcons fans waited hours, but the bus never showed.
Meanwhile, Freeman had flown to Houston because, as she said on Facebook, she had Super Bowl events to attend as the Birdlady. The story of disgruntled bus-ticket purchasers made the news. Both Freeman and Nell Minton, who ran SYTI Events, blamed each other when contacted by local television stations.
Washington and Barbara Phillips, who signed up for the trip through Freeman’s ad, said Minton refunded their money for the trips. They said neither heard from Freeman. Minton did not respond to ESPN queries.
Freeman said she had nothing to do with trip financing or money collection and that her only job was to promote the trip packages. She said she wasn’t paid for promoting the trip, and those refunded by Minton received money because she pressured him to do so.
In a television interview a year later, Freeman said she had received death threats. She said the biggest lesson she learned is: “I have to check everybody out.”
THE MORNING FREEMAN was arrested, she began her day accompanied by the same Atlanta News First reporter who broke the story about the Chiefs tailgate. The reporter trailed her as she rode around in a golf cart and posed for photos with fans.
Asked about the disgruntled fans asking for refunds, Freeman told the reporter there was no money to return. She said the same to ESPN.
Claiming she hadn’t missed a game in years, Freeman left to enter the stadium and cheer for her beloved Falcons.
Seven Sundays later, when the Falcons squared off at home against the New York Giants. Freeman’s two Section 116 season-ticket spaces sat vacant for the first half.
By the second half, when it was clear no one would stop them, two people took the seats to watch what became the Falcons’ last win of the season, seemingly unaware of whose place they were taking.