With Everything on the Line, Fani Willis Delivered Raw Testimony

Fani T. Willis walked unaccompanied through the front door of a Fulton County courtroom on Thursday afternoon in a bright magenta dress and announced she was ready to testify. She was interrupting her lawyer, who at that very moment was trying to convince a judge that she should not have to testify at all.

“I’m going to go,” Ms. Willis said.

And so she did.

For roughly three hours on Thursday, Ms. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., engaged in the fight of her life from the witness stand to try to salvage the case of her life, the prosecution of former President Donald J. Trump.

In a raw performance, Ms. Willis, 52, presented herself as a woman in full — by turns combative and serene, focused and discursive (at one point she declared her preference for Grey Goose vodka over wine). Her language toggled between casual (a thousand dollars was “a G”) and precise: On numerous occasions, she prefaced her statements with variations on the phrase, “I want to be very clear.”

She upbraided Ashleigh Merchant, one of the defense lawyers questioning her, alleging that Ms. Merchant’s court filings — which accused Ms. Willis of having a disqualifying conflict of interest stemming from a romantic relationship with Nathan J. Wade, the special prosecutor on the case — were full of lies. At one point her voice approached a yell, prompting Scott McAfee, the mild-mannered judge, to call a five-minute recess in an apparent effort to cool things down.

Elsewhere, Ms. Willis chided Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Steven Sadow, when he asked if she had been in contact with Mr. Wade in 2020. Noting that Mr. Wade had cancer at the time, she said, “I am not going to emasculate a Black man.”

She spoke of giving Mr. Wade a trip to Belize for his 50th birthday — earlier in the day, Ms. Merchant had asked Mr. Wade about the couple visiting a tattoo parlor there. She also admitted, in a digression that the lawyers’ questions did not seem to prompt, that she thought Mr. Wade had a sexist view of the world, and said it was the reason they broke up last summer.

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