Fani Willis

Fani Willis (born October 27, 1971, Inglewood, California, U.S.) is an American lawyer who currently serves as the district attorney of Fulton county, Georgia. The county’s seat is located in Atlanta, the state’s capital and largest city. Willis gained a nationwide reputation as a bold prosecutor in August 2023, when she secured an indictment of then former president Donald Trump and 18 of his allies for having violated Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act in their efforts to overturn Trump’s loss of the state to Joe Biden in the presidential election of 2020 (see Georgia indictment of Donald Trump). Her impending prosecution of Trump was effectively delayed in December 2024 when the Georgia Court of Appeals reversed a pretrial ruling allowing Willis to remain on the case provided that the lead prosecutor, with whom she had a romantic relationship, departed from her team. The appeals court held instead that the “significant appearance of impropriety” noted by the lower court had not been eliminated and that Willis herself should also be removed. Willis then petitioned the Georgia Supreme Court to review the appeals court’s decision.

Education and early career

Willis moved with her family from her birthplace in Inglewood, California, to Washington, D.C., where she entered first grade. Her father, John C. Floyd III, had been a cofounder of the Black Panther Party of Los Angeles and later became a criminal defense attorney. After their arrival in Washington, Willis’s parents divorced, and her mother later returned to California. Willis spent most of her youth with her father.

After attending an all-girls Roman Catholic high school in Maryland, Willis entered Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she graduated cum laude in 1992 with a bachelor’s degree in political science and government. She then moved to Atlanta to pursue a juris doctor degree at the Emory University School of Law, which she earned in 1996.

Beginning in 2001 Willis worked as a prosecutor at the Fulton County district attorney’s office, where she gained extensive experience in the enforcement of Georgia’s RICO law. In 2014–15 she led the prosecution of 12 public school teachers who had been accused of altering student responses in order to falsely inflate the results of state-administered examinations (several other educators had accepted plea deals before the trial). Eleven of the defendants were found guilty of racketeering.

In 2018 Willis entered private practice as the head of her own law firm, the Law Offices of Fani T. Willis, LLC, which specialized in criminal defense, business law, and family law. Later that year she ran unsuccessfully for a seat on the Superior Court of Fulton County. In 2019, while still in private practice, she was appointed chief municipal judge for the city of South Fulton, Georgia, and in 2020 she was elected district attorney of Fulton county, having defeated her former boss, District Attorney Paul Howard, Jr., in a preceding Democratic primary. She was elected to a second term as district attorney in 2024.

Since taking office in 2021 Willis has handled several high-profile cases, in addition to her prosecution of Trump and his associates. In May 2022, for example, her office indicted the famous Atlanta rap artist Young Thug (Jeffery Lamar Williams) and 27 others on charges related to their criminal activities as members of the street gang Young Slime Life and their conspiracy to violate Georgia’s RICO law; some of the defendants were also charged with murder and attempted armed robbery.

The prosecution of Donald Trump

On February 10, 2021, Willis launched a criminal investigation of attempts by Trump and his allies to persuade or compel various Georgia officials, including Gov. Brian Kemp, to reverse or invalidate Biden’s victory in the state. As part of his effort, Trump telephoned Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and demanded that he “find” 11,780 votes, the minimum number of additional votes needed by Trump to win the election in Georgia. Raffensperger respectfully refused, attesting to the accuracy of the state’s vote count. In January 2022 Willis was granted a special-purpose grand jury to investigate allegations of electoral meddling by Trump and his associates—including former New York City mayor Rudolf Giuliani, who had served as one of Trump’s personal lawyers, and Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows. In August 2023 a regular grand jury issued indictments of Trump and others on a total of 41 criminal counts; Trump himself was indicted on 13 felony counts, including violation of the Georgia RICO Act and offenses consisting of soliciting public officers to violate their oaths of office. (In March 2024 the judge assigned to the case, Scott McAfee, removed the counts related to oath-of-office violations from the indictment, holding that prosecutors had not properly identified the violations that Trump and his codefendants had allegedly solicited. In September McAfee dismissed three more counts from the indictment on the ground that Georgia lacked necessary jurisdiction. After the judge’s rulings, Trump continued to face eight criminal counts.)

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Shortly after his indictment, Trump posed for a required mug shot at a Fulton county jailhouse, marking the first time in U.S. history that a former president was photographed by police as a criminal suspect.

As indicated above, Trump and most of his codefendants pursued a legal strategy involving multiple and repetitive appeals and other motions designed to significantly delay the impending trial. In January 2024 one of the codefendants filed a motion asking Judge McAfee to dismiss the entire case on the ground that Willis was involved in a romantic relationship with a lawyer she had hired to direct the prosecution, Nathan Wade. Willis formally acknowledged the relationship but claimed that it had ended in August 2023 and had not affected her conduct of the case. After an evidential hearing beginning in February, McAfee ruled that either Willis and her office (the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office) or Wade must step aside but refused to dismiss the indictment altogether. Although Wade quickly resigned from Willis’s team, Trump and other codefendants asked the Georgia Court of Appeals to reverse McAfee’s decision, which further delayed the trial. In December 2024 the appeals court disqualified Willis from the case, holding that Wade’s removal did not adequately address the “appearance of impropriety” and the “odor of mendacity” noted by McAfee. However, it also denied the appellants’ request to dismiss the indictment. In early January 2025 Willis asked the Georgia Supreme Court to reverse her disqualification.