“Our subcontractors should never have placed their advertisers in a U-Haul van, and those involved were immediately reprimanded,” Tim Pollard of Blitz Canvassing told WIRED.

On Wednesday, October 30, Muldrow and her fellow knockers were fired hours after the WIRED story was published.

At first, some people had trouble logging into Campaign Sidekick, the problematic app that America PAC uses to campaign. There was confusion before finally being told it was all over: “Everybody got fired,” Jones, who served as doorknob manager, said in a GroupMe chat, according to screenshots obtained by WIRED.

Jones did not respond to a request for comment.

Muldrow thought Jones might be joking about getting everyone fired, but according to the group chat, some of the doorknockers realized they weren’t included in the Sidekick Campaign.

“I called my mom right away,” Muldrow says. “My mom told me I was overreacting because she was my cousin and said, ‘Maybe he’s playing a prank on you.’ Don’t take this literally.’ And my mother said: ‘He sent you there in the first place. You went with it. If anything happens, you can fly home through it. He won’t let you get into trouble.”

Then, Muldrow says, Jones began asking doorknobs which one was talking to the press.

As the discussions progressed, Muldrow began to fear for her safety. Muldrow packed up her belongings and called 29-year-old political consultant Connor Berdy, who lives in Warren, Mich., and is the founder of Vote For Change LLC, a consulting group in Southeast Michigan, for community organizing efforts.

Muldrow had met Berdy, who was campaigning for school board, county commission and judicial candidates, by chance on Oct. 23, when one of his staffers chatted with him while he was campaigning near their home. Soon after they ate lunch, Muldrow told him how doorknockers in his group had been tricked, threatened, and driven to doorknocking locations in U-Hauls.

Berdy says management “clearly did not prioritize the safety of workers or the integrity of the operation.”

Berdy then arrived and pretended to be an Uber driver to get Muldrow out of the situation. He had already bought Muldrow a plane ticket back to Florida and paid out of his own pocket.