In another run-in with the justice system, video shows him declaring the magistrate and several police officers “under arrest” during a 2019 hearing.
He’d been fined and banned from driving for two years for speeding, refusing to provide a drug test and driving off filming his police on his mobile phone in Porepunkah in November 2020.
He went to the County Court in an attempt to get those charges thrown out, arguing he was acting in self-defence, under “extreme duress” and “felt threats of harm”.
“I felt threatened and preyed upon … even the sight of a cop or a cop car … it’s like an Auschwitz survivor seeing a Nazi soldier,” he told the court, according to excerpts from the follow-up Supreme Court case.Â
“What’s worse than a swastika is the inverted pentagram, the Satanic symbol that they wear and they behave like it as well.”
The County Court judge agreed to drop the speeding charge but rejected Freeman’s self-defence assertions and upheld the other two charges.
That decision was backed up by Supreme Court Justice James Gorton, who denied his application for a judicial review.
The judgment shows some excerpts from his run-in with arresting officer Acting Sergeant Rachelle Maher after she pulled him over for going 76km/h in a 60km/h zone.
“I don’t give a shit. Leave me alone, you terrorist. Get the hell away from me and go,” he said, when asked to produce his licence.
He went on to refer to police as “corrupt scum” and “corrupt filth”.
In another incident, Freeman reportedly led an attempted private prosecution of then premier Daniel Andrews for treason in 2021 and was arrested while protesting outside court in Myrtleford on the day the case was due to be heard. It was thrown out.
In another brush with the legal system, Freeman tried to “arrest” a magistrate and several police officers while appearing in Wangaratta Magistrates Court.Â
“I arrest you for aiding and abetting, OK, but I arrest you for acting oppressively and when interested and perverting the course of justice,” Freeman says in video of the hearing.
“You must stand down. You’re now in my custody and under arrest. You are not free to leave.”
He’s told to sit down and he is eventually asked to leave the courtroom while trying to read out a document to the court.
Late tonight, police were still combing bushland near Porepunkah for the alleged gunman.
