Over 100 women have signed on to a statement in support of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. Signers include Shirley Franklin, former Atlanta Mayor, and civil rights leader Helen Butler. The statement reads as follows:
We, the undersigned women, fully support Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and call for an immediate end to the unwarranted investigations into her personal life, as it bears no relevance to her professional responsibilities. When Black women ascend to positions where their voices can be heard, their presence seen, and their power felt, it often unsettles certain individuals in this country. We are currently witnessing a concerted effort to scrutinize and attack Black women in positions of power, finding any issue or flaw, no matter how small, to use against them.
In Charles M. Blow’s New York Times column, “The Persecution of Harvard’s Claudine Gay,’ he refers to this phenomenon as the “Wonder Woman requirement”—the relentless pursuit of the slightest imperfections to persecute Black women who rise to high positions. We knew that the first Black woman to become the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia would face challenges, especially when prosecuting powerful men.
We simply request that DA Fani Willis be afforded the same dignity and respect as her peers, or merely treated with the same level of respect as previously shown to her. There was no scrutiny of her personal life when she prosecuted and locked up Black teachers, or when she indicted Black gang members. Let’s not alter the standards just because she’s pursuing wealthy, politically involved men.
Remove the unfair burdens placed on Black women and stop subjecting us to higher standards than others. We are not Wonder Woman. Black women have endured centuries of oppression, from slavery and Jim Crow to various forms of bias. We’ve been the backbone of the fight for civil rights and women’s rights.
We’ve shouldered the burden of holding families together amidst the fallout from a welfare system that divided us, the scourge of drugs, and mass incarceration that took our fathers, husbands, and sons away. We continue the tireless battle against police brutality, inequality, and voter suppression.
Despite these challenges, Black women persist in pursuing education and have broken barriers to excel in all sectors of the professional world. It’s time for this biased treatment to end. As the brave freedom fighter Fannie Lou Hamer declared, “We are sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Let Fani Willis’ private life remain exactly that – private. Stop the witch hunt.
More Info and Fani Willis
Fulton County’s first female district attorney is facing the possibility of being kicked off the highest-profile case of her career – prosecuting Donald Trump – because of her relationship with a man she hired to work on the case.
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, on 14 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.”
