Heather Donahue, the retired actor of “The Blair Witch Project” fame, is running for Freedom’s Select Board nearly a year after she was ousted from the post in a recall.
“I’m running because I love our town. The recall didn’t change that,” Donahue wrote in an email to the BDN.
The election will be decided at Freedom’s town meeting on March 14 at 10 a.m. at the Mt. View school complex in Thorndike.
Donahue said she has continued to serve Freedom on its Comprehensive Plan Committee this year.
“I intend to keep showing up wherever the work needs to be done,” she wrote.
She also cited her record of “stopping bad power line routes, opposing commercial solar on farmland, defending public access, pushing for transparency, and keeping budgets disciplined,” in a candidate’s forum last month.
Donahue moved to Maine in 2022 and was elected to Freedom’s Select Board in 2024. Soon after she became embroiled in a bitter dispute over whether a 1.5 mile section of a local dirt road, Beaver Ridge Road, is public or private.
After researching the history of the road, Donahue painted more than two dozen orange blazes on trees along the road – a move that critics said violated the town charter. Donahue argued that she was surveying the road in her official capacity as Select Board member.
In April of 2025, Freedom residents voted 122-91 to recall Donahue from the board.
No evidence has been presented to support the claims made during the recall, Donahue wrote.
Noting that the town has had two recalls in a single year, she added that she thinks the town’s recall ordinance should be “revisited so that recalls require some factual basis rather than hearsay.”
The road dispute is headed to court. On Saturday, the town’s Select Board rejected a consent decree, which Donahue also opposes, that would have resolved a lawsuit brought by landowners against the town and granted a public easement on the road.
