All eyes will be on Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis next week when she is expected to announce criminal charges against former President Donald Trump for his alleged attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Willis, who has nearly two decades of service under her belt and is the first black woman to lead the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office, says she’s ready for what could be the highest-profile case of her career.
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She has already been on the receiving end of disparaging remarks by Trump and his allies, with the latest being a 60-second attack ad called “The Fraud Squad” that refers to her as “Biden’s newest lackey” and alleges she had an affair with a gang member she was prosecuting.
Willis has purportedly instructed her staff to stand down, not respond, and let the facts play out, but those who know her, including rival attorneys, are coming to her defense.
“Look, I might find myself on the other side of an indictment in her office, and I may very well disagree with her staff that we might battle out in court, but this is what I know to be true and clear, and that is she walks with integrity and she’s professional,” lawyer Gabe Banks, who has known Willis for 15 years, told WSB-TV. He added that “there’s no merit to any assertion that she’s had any relationship other than a professional relationship as a lawyer with some alleged gang member.”
Melissa Redmon, who worked in the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office at the same time as Willis, told the BBC that Willis has “a reputation of always being prepared.”
“Given the type of cases she prosecuted, that took a tremendous amount of dedication,” she said.
Willis, who was born in Inglewood, California, and moved to Washington, D.C., when she was in first grade, has led more than 100 jury trials, handled hundreds of murder cases, and has held a conviction rate close to 90% ever since she took over as Fulton County’s chief prosecutor.
Willis has said her love of law started at an early age when her father, a member of the Black Panthers and a criminal defense attorney, brought her to the courthouse with him. She even subbed in as his pint-sized file clerk when she was in elementary school.
At Howard University, she studied political science and graduated cum laude in 1993 before moving to Atlanta to attend law school. On the day she took the state bar exam, she met Fred Willis, a videographer. The two hit it off, got married, and had two daughters together before divorcing in 2005.
Willis would then spend more than a decade as a prosecutor in Fulton County. For eight years straight, she focused on murder cases.
“I wore a pager and got up in the middle of the night and walked over bodies,” she told the New York Times. “And I know what kind of pain it causes when you lose someone.”
Before Trump, her highest-profile case was against a group of Atlanta public school educators who allegedly cheated on standardized tests in an effort to protect their jobs and receive bonuses from administrators. The trial, which lasted eight months, still holds the record for the longest criminal trial in Georgia history. Willis was criticized and labeled a “sellout” for going after teachers from a struggling school district, but she stood firm.
She oversaw the death penalty case against the shooter in the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings and has also indicted popular rapper Young Thug under Georgia’s RICO Act.
If Willis brings charges against Trump, she will be joining a small group of prosecutors that includes special counsel Jack Smith and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg to have also gone after the former president for wrongdoing. Trump has already been charged in three criminal cases. In New York, he faces 34 felony counts concerning hush money he allegedly paid a porn star. In Florida, he faces 40 criminal counts related to classified documents. In Washington, D.C., he faces four criminal charges, including conspiracy to defraud the United States, for his alleged role in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
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Trump has maintained his innocence and has claimed multiple times he is the victim of a political witch hunt.
Willis launched her investigation into Trump in February 2021, just days after news broke that the former president had called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, and pressured him to “find” the votes needed to secure a win against President Joe Biden. In May 2022, Willis convened a special grand jury, which interviewed 75 witnesses, including former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA), Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani.
