Politics

The former president baselessly accused Fani Willis, who is investigating his 2020 election meddling, of having an “affair” with a “gang member”

During a Tuesday campaign event in New Hampshire, Donald Trump leveled a bizarre accusation against Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, suggesting she had had an “affair” with a “gang member” she was prosecuting.

“They say there’s a young woman — a young racist in Atlanta — they say she was after a certain gang and she ended up having an affair with the head of the gang or a gang member. And this is a person who wants to indict me […] wants to indict me for a perfect phone call,” Trump told supporters.

In May 2022, Willis empaneled a grand jury to investigate Trump and his allies’ efforts to interfere with Georgia’s 2020 election outcome, including the former president’s so-called “perfect” call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, during which he pressured him to “find” the votes necessary for him to win the election.

Trump has repeatedly attempted to discredit prosecutors investigating him, and while it’s unclear what Trump was talking about when he accused Willis of having an affair with “gang member,”, recent social media posts indicate that he is wildly misrepresenting a case she handled in 2019.

In January, Rolling Stone spoke to rapper YSL Mondo, who co-founded the Young Stoner Life (YSL) music label with Young Thug. Willis represented Mondo during a 2019 aggravated assault case, and would later go on to prosecute YSL’s Young Thug and 13 other defendants in a RICO case alleging that the music group had affiliations with gang violence in the Atlanta area.

According to Mondo, Willis’ prosecution of Young Thug ran contrary to the impression he’d developed of the prosecutor when she represented him. “This is not her character, this is not who she is,” he told Rolling Stone. “I done had auntie-to-nephew, mother-to-son type of talks with her. I know this not her character. This is what made me start looking at [the YSL case] like I know it’s bigger than just her. It’s politics behind this shit. It’s other people that’s behind her pulling strings.”

Mondo did not immediately respond to a request for additional comment from Rolling Stone. Willis also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

On Friday, Trump posted a video on Truth Social painting Willis as a member of a “fraud squad” of prosecutors unfairly targeting him under the command of President Joe Biden. The video featured the headline of Rolling Stone’s interview with Mondo, and claimed that Willis “got caught hiding a relationship with a gang member she was prosecuting.”

While there’s no indication that Willis hid her representation of Mondo — or that their relationship was romantic in nature — far-right commentator and Trump ally Laura Loomer seized on the claim in the video to suggest that Willis had a sexual affair with her client.

“Atlanta DA, Fani Willis, who is targeting Donald Trump in Georgia is a straight up THOT,” Loomer wrote along with the video in a Twitter post last week. “Turns out she failed to disclose a previous relationship she had with a gang banger she was supposed to be prosecuting. Baby girl belongs in a Trap House. Not a court house.”

It appears to have been enough for Trump to go ahead and accuse Willis of sleeping with a gang member.

Willis herself is expected to bring an indictment related to her own investigation into Trump later this month, one that could possibly include RICO charges, so it’s not surprising that the former president is cranking his smear machine into overdrive.