Congressional candidate allegedly threatens Dartmouth resident

Oct 20, 2020

A Dartmouth resident filed a police report alleging that he was threatened through voicemail by a Republican congressional candidate earlier this month. 

Rayla Campbell — who is running in the state’s 7th Congressional District as a write-in candidate against incumbent Rep. Ayanna Pressley — left a voicemail to Mass GOP Vice Chair Tom Mountain in which she allegedly threatened violence against Dartmouth resident Brock Cordeiro.

Cordeiro serves on the Republican State Committee for the Second Bristol and Plymouth State Senate District.

“We’ve got a big problem — Brock, who works with the sheriff, decided that it would be either funny or okay with him to block me from the Massachusetts for Trump 2020 page,” Campbell said in the voicemail. “This needs to be fixed now because I will find out where this little motherf**cker lives and beat him a new a**hole.”

According to Cordeiro, the dispute between the two began after he blocked her from the  Massachusetts For Trump 2020 Facebook group he administers. 

The Dartmouth Republican claims that many of Campbell’s posts were either “self-serving” for her own campaign or were attacks against Gov. Charlie Baker for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

“She was posting things completely irrelevant to the campaign,” he said. “Our goal here is to have a united campaign.”

Cordeiro added that Campbell began privately messaging him through Facebook on Oct. 18, demanding that he unblock her from the group. He said that she was “belligerent in her demands.” 

Cordeiro cited the voicemail and the armed security that Campbell travels with as the reasons he reported the incident to Dartmouth Police on Oct. 11.

The write-in candidate said she had no comment on Cordeiro’s allegations, although she had previously tweeted her displeasure with the Dartmouth resident, calling him a “boolicker extraordinaire” and that she was kicked out of the group “for weak and pathetic reasons.” 

Campbell had previously been involved in a physical altercation at a pro-Trump event in New Bedford on Oct. 12 in which she claimed she was assaulted by two women in a parking lot.

She was reportedly asked to cease all activity and involvement with the Trump campaign by RNC National Committee member Ron Kaufman and Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson — who is the honorary chairman for Trump’s reelection campaign in the commonwealth.

Hodgson also declined to comment.