Donald Trump’s Georgia prosecutor is the daughter of a black nationalist activist, a lawyer and political aide who founded the Black Panther party chapter in Los Angeles.
The elected Democrat District Attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, Fani T. Willis was born in 1971 as Fani T. Floyd in Inglewood, California, a town in the South Bay region of Los Angeles County.
Floyd, 50, is the driver behind former President Donald Trump’s most recent indictment, handing down a slew of state charges in Georgia around allegations that Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election.
After living in California as a child, Willis moved to Maryland, where she attended Regina High School in the Prince George’s County Washington, D.C. suburb of Hyattsville. After high school she attended Howard University, graduating in 1993, and then attending Emory University School of Law.
She began her career as a prosecutor in 2002, joining the district attorney’s office that she now oversees. She spent 16 years as a prosecutor there before running for a superior court judgeship, which she lost in 2018. She was elected Fulton County D.A. in the fall election of 2020, defeating a six-term incumbent who was her former boss, District Attorney Paul Howard, Jr.
Willis is divorced from Fred Willis. They have two adult daughters, Nia (24) and Kinaya (22).
Willis once served as the chief judge of the municipal court in South Fulton, Georgia, where she lives. She was appointed to the job after losing her race for superior court judge in 2018.
The First Black D.A. in Fulton County
Willis, like New York prosecutor Alvin Bragg and New York Attorney General Letitia James, is a “first” in her current job. She is the first black woman to be the Fulton County District Attorney – the largest district attorney’s office in Georgia.
She has considerable prosecutorial experience, having worked as a prosecutor for 19 years. She led more than 100 jury trials and “hundreds of murder cases.” Since becoming D.A., her office’s conviction rate has been nearly 90 percent.
She is well-known around Atlanta for a 2013 case she brought against a group of local educators. In 2022, according to a New York Times article, “Before the Trump investigation, Ms. Willis’s most high-profile case, as an assistant prosecutor, was against a group of Atlanta public school system educators, who were indicted in 2013 and charged with racketeering for altering students’ standardized test scores in an effort to protect their jobs and win favor and bonuses from administrators.”
Citing a 3,000-person witness list in that case, Willis credits it as the best preparation for her prosecution against President Trump.
“She also learned how to handle intense controversy,” according to the New York Times article. “Most of the defendants were Black. So were many of her critics, who were displeased by the sight of teachers from a struggling urban school district put on trial. She was called a sellout, she said, and worse.”
Her Father, John Clifford Floyd, Black Panther Activist and Criminal Defense Lawyer
Fani Willis was born to a black nationalist activist in Los Angeles in 1971.
At the time, her father, John Clifford Floyd, was working as assistant press secretary to Democrat Tom Bradley, who would run unsuccessfully for Los Angeles mayor in 1969 before being elected on his second try, in 1973.
Bradley defeated incumbent Democrat Sam Yorty, who made John Floyd an issue in the campaign for Bradley. He identified Floyd as the organizer of the Black Panthers in California, and pointed out that Black Panther “defense minister” and ex-con Huey Newton had endorsed Bradley for mayor.
A Nebraska native, John Floyd moved to California at age 1. He ran for Los Angeles City Council in 1966, at age 23, telling the Los Angeles Times that “he was appalled by the political fighting around the (federal) poverty programs” in the city, including nascent “welfare” systems and public housing development. Floyd argued for more tax money, arguing the amounts offered were “oppressive.”
Floyd was an active member of the black nationalist “Black Panthers” party and, in 1967, formed the first California chapter of the group in Los Angeles, according to an article in the Southwest Topics-Wave, a community newspaper published at the time.
In a Black Panther interview video, he talked about his personal work with both Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X.
John Floyd was active in politics. He helped run Jesse Jackson’s 1984 failed presidential bid. He got Fani interested in law at an early age. He put her to work at the courthouse as his file clerk starting when she was in grade school.
In 1968, John Floyd sued the Los Angeles Police for $2 million ($17.6 million in 2023 dollars) after they arrested him for loitering. He said the word “connotes a possible sexual connotation.”
A 1968 Los Angeles Times story reported John C. Floyd’s lawsuit against Los Angeles Police.
Fani Willis was raised by both her mother and her father, who divorced. She remembers splitting her time between their households.
She had a foothold in the racial tensions of her time. As an undergraduate, Fani Willis attended Freaknik – “the boisterous, mostly Black Atlanta street party that became a headache for city leaders and an inspiration for the novelist Tom Wolfe’s satirical exploration of the Southern city and its racial divides.”
A Self-Labeled ‘Career Trial Lawyer’ Using Trump’s Indictment to Fundraise
When asked about who she is, Willis calls herself a “career trial lawyer.” Sharp-tongued and cross, Willis once lashed out at Georgia Governor Brian Kemp’s lawyer, Brian McEvoy, writing in a nasty email exchange: “You have taken my kindness as weakness. Despite your disdain this investigation continues and will not be derailed by anyone’s antics.”
In a confusing misstep of decorum, four days before her indictment against former President Trump, Willis launched a new campaign fundraising website that bragged about her investigation into Trump.