Who is Fani Willis, the prosecutor taking on Donald Trump in Georgia?

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has told US media she is carrying out the Trump probe as she would any other case

Fulton County's first female district attorney has been spared the humiliation of being kicked off the highest-profile case of her career - prosecuting Donald Trump - because of her affair with a prosecutor she hired. But she hasn't heard the end of this.

Fani Willis was preparing to start her new role as Fulton County district attorney in Georgia when Donald Trump made a phone call to a top Republican in the state that would upend her work for the next several years.

On 2 January 2021, the former president phoned Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and asked him to "find 11,780 votes", the number he needed to beat Joe Biden, who had won the state and the 2020 presidential election several weeks before.

Audio from the call was leaked to US media the next day, whipping up a massive political and legal storm on Ms Willis's first day in office.

"How soon I knew an investigation may be warranted was on day one," Ms Willis told USA Today in 2022.

Two-and-a-half years after that phone call, in August 2023, a grand jury in Fulton County voted to charge Mr Trump and 18 others with attempting to overturn the election result in the state.

Mr Trump's lawyers called the indictment "shocking and absurd".

Ms Willis is known by fellow Georgia lawyers and those who have worked with her as a dogged prosecutor capable of securing convictions in high-profile and complex cases.

"She had a reputation of always being prepared," said Melissa Redmon, who worked in the Fulton County district attorney's office at the same time as Ms Willis. "Given the type of cases she prosecuted, that took a tremendous amount of dedication."

Ms Willis used that rigour in an Atlanta Public Schools scandal involving officials who cheated to improve standardised test scores, and in prosecuting several well-known rappers accused of gang crimes.

She has insisted that in investigating Mr Trump, her office followed the same procedures it would use to look into any reports of a possible crime.

"The reality is, we have a job, and the job is just to try to find the truth," she told the New York Times in February. "We're just going to do that [Trump] case like every other."

The first female Fulton County DA

Born in Inglewood, California, in 1971, Ms Willis was raised primarily by her father, a criminal defence lawyer and member of the Black Panthers, the radical political organisation.

She graduated from the historically black Howard University in 1993, before receiving a law degree from Emory University in Georgia in 1996.

Just five years later, Ms Willis joined the Fulton County district attorney's office, where she served in several different divisions until 2018.

During her nearly two decades there, Ms Willis led more than 100 jury trials, including the longest criminal trial in Georgia history. It ended with convictions for 11 of 12 Atlanta public school officials accused of cheating on state-administered standardised tests in 2009 for better bonuses and promotions.

She gained a reputation as an exceptionally skilled prosecutor, even among the accused, said Ms Redmon. During her time at the DA's office, Ms Redmon remembers hearing a defendant once plead with a relative to try to get a witness to leave town because the prosecutor tackling their case, Ms Willis, was "a genius".

In 2020, after years in private practice, Ms Willis decided to go head-to-head with her former boss, six-term Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard.

She won in a runoff election with 73% of the votes, becoming the first black woman to serve as Fulton County's top prosecutor.

The probe against Trump

Ms Willis launched the investigation into Mr Trump's post-election conduct just a month after his phone call to Mr Raffensperger.

Her office interviewed dozens of witnesses, including top Georgia Republican officials like Governor Brian Kemp and Mr Raffensperger as well as Mr Trump's former lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

Mr Trump, a Republican, says the prosecution by Ms Willis, a Democrat, is politically motivated.

She says no-one is above the law.

"I do not have the right to look the other way on a crime that could have impacted a major right of people in this community and throughout the nation," she told the New York Times last September, referring to the right to vote.

The accusations against Fani Willis

But the sprawling and historic case was almost derailed after it was revealed that Ms Willis had an affair with a lead prosecutor on the case, Nathan Wade.

One of Mr Trump's co-defendants, Michael Roman, asked a judge to disqualify her and drop some of the charges, saying the case was tainted.

She took the stand in an evidentiary hearing in February to angrily deny testimony from a former friend of hers that the relationship with Mr Wade began long before Ms Willis hired him to the Trump case.

The district attorney also rejected accusations of financial impropriety, telling the court that she and Mr Wade had split the cost of their holidays to destinations including Aruba, Belize, the Bahamas and Napa Valley.

In March, Judge Scott McAfee agreed that her affair was a "tremendous lapse in judgement" and did create an "appearance of impropriety". He also found her testimony had been "unprofessional". But he decided she could stay on the case so long as Mr Wade was removed.

The judge also threw out six of the charges, including a key count against Mr Trump relating to the Raffensperger phone call, and two others.

But that is far from the end of the matter.

Georgia Republicans have enacted a law that empowers a state commission to remove rogue and incompetent prosecutors. Democrats fear the measure is aimed at Ms Willis.

And the state Senate has created a special committee that is investigating whether she used state money to benefit herself by employing Mr Wade.

The controversy is likely to continue to at least prove a distraction for the Fulton County district attorney as she pursues a career-defining case.

With additional reporting from Kayla Epstein