Why the Case Against Fani Willis Feels Familiar to Black Women

Tangala L. Hollis-Palmer felt asense of pride when she learned that Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., and one of the nation’s few elected Black female prosecutors, would lead the election interference case against former President Donald J. Trump.

But that pride would be tempered by dismay as news emerged of Ms. Willis’s personal relationship with a fellow prosecutor, Nathan J. Wade, an outside lawyer she hired to help run the case. Ms. Hollis-Palmer, a Black, 40-year-old attorney from Mississippi, is mostly upset at critics trying, she said, to discredit Ms. Willis. At first, she was skeptical of the allegations. But when Ms. Willis herself conceded the relationship, Ms. Hollis reserved some disappointment for the prosecutor who should have used a “little more discretion and a little better judgment,” she said.

Mr. Trump and several co-defendants are calling Ms. Willis’s hiring of Mr. Wade a conflict of interest and want Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade disqualified, potentially upending a critical case against the former president and doing grievous damage to Ms. Willis’s reputation.

“We just have to be so careful when we are in these positions to not give people the ammunition to come after us,” Ms. Hollis-Palmer said.

On Thursday, a Georgia judge is scheduled to hear evidence on the relationship between the two prosecutors.

A defense lawyer for one of Mr. Trump’s co-defendants argues that Ms. Willis’s hiring of Mr. Wade is a “form of self-dealing” that provides Ms. Willis with incentive to keep the case going.

Mr. Wade has earned more than $650,000 since his hiring in 2021 while also spending money on joint vacations he has taken with Ms. Willis, issues that will be central to the hearing this week. Ms. Willis has said that the costs of joint personal travel have been “divided roughly evenly” between her and Mr. Wade.

Interviews with a dozen Black women at varying stages of their careers found them to be painfully conflicted about Ms. Willis’s situation and her treatment in the public eye.

To many, there is something galling about watching Mr. Trump and his allies attack Ms. Willis over a consensual romantic relationship when he has faced accusations of sexual misconduct and assault. Mr. Trump was recently ordered by a Manhattan jury to pay $83.3 million to the writer E. Jean Carroll for defaming her after she accused him of a decades-old rape. A civil jury also found Mr. Trump liable for sexually abusing Ms. Carroll.

Some lamented Ms. Willis’s conduct as a mistake, but not one that should remove her from the case against Mr. Trump. Others, thinking about their own experiences in the workplace, suggested another concern: They feel that Black women are held to a different standard and that Ms. Willis should have known that her identity, along with the enormous political stakes of the case, would create a white-hot spotlight on her personal conduct.

“I can’t sit in judgment of her as a human being, but I can say, in terms of her role as a public prosecutor, yeah, she showed bad judgment,” said Donna Brazile, a former chair of the Democratic National Committee, adding that she had always kept a clear separation between her own personal and professional life with “a bright red line.”

She said Ms. Willis faced “vitriol” and “racial animus” as a woman of color in a position of power.

But, Ms. Brazile said, some of the attention is to be expected for a high-profile person involved in a high-profile case, especially one that concerns a former president of the United States.

“She is undergoing public scrutiny — she’s a public official,” Ms. Brazile said. “Comes with the territory.”

Jeff DiSantis, a spokesman for Ms. Willis’s office, declined to comment.

The discussions about race, gender and Ms. Willis’s dilemma have played out in group chats with text messages flying back and forth, in kitchen table discussions between couples and at student hangouts.

“We deal with the sexism as well as the racism,” Ms. Hollis-Palmer said. “But sometimes the sexism is a little worse.” She practices law with her husband and said that when they walk into a courtroom, people automatically assume that he’s the lead counsel. “A lot of times people have thought that I was his assistant,” she added.

When publicly discussing Ms. Willis’s predicament, some women of color have tried to walk a tightrope of empathy and anger.

Those conflicting feelings played out during a recent discussion on the daytime talk show “The View.”

“I’m very pissed off, too,” said the co-host Ana Navarro-Cárdenas, who is a Nicaraguan American. “Because when you are a woman of color in such a high-profile position, you know that the scrutiny that’s going to befall you is greater than on anybody else, and she needed to have kept her house clean.”

The co-host Sunny Hostin, who is Black and Latina, chimed in, “Your stuff cannot stink,” before adding that she agreed with Ms. Navarro-Cárdenas.

In some cases, the concerns about Ms. Willis’s treatment are balanced with uneasiness over how her behavior could jeopardize a potential Trump conviction.

“My initial reaction was that it seemed to be kind of a halfhearted attempt to get the entire case thrown out, which I thought was just an incredible stretch,” said Faith Udobang, 25, president of the University of Chicago Black Law Student Association.

But now she is worried that the misconduct accusations against Ms. Willis could delay the outcome until after the election.

“I believe the American people deserve to have adequate information once they go to the polls,” she said.

Some legal observers have said the attempts to disqualify Ms. Willis rest on shaky legal ground. They say the allegations against Ms. Willis have nothing to do with whether or not Mr. Trump interfered with the state’s election in 2020, and conspired to subvert the will of Georgia voters. But lawyers for defendants could use the misconduct allegations to undermine perceptions about the fairness of the prosecution by calling into question Ms. Willis’s judgment.

In a January address at one of Atlanta’s oldest Black churches, Ms. Willis suggested that her critics are playing the “race card.” She defended her hiring of Mr. Wade and said that his “impeccable credentials” were only being questioned because they are both Black.

“Obviously, it was in somebody’s interest to bring her down,” said the former Senator Carol Moseley Braun, Democrat of Illinois and the first Black woman to serve in the Senate. “The fact that she’s a high-profile Black woman just means that she’s a bigger target.”

Others are less sure that race or gender are central to fueling the accusations, but instead argue that anyone in Ms. Willis’s position would be the target of personal attacks from Mr. Trump.

Luci Walker, a 54-year-old data analyst from Decatur, Ga., said she doesn’t believe Ms. Willis’s race or gender had played a role in the scrutiny.

“It would be some reason or another, but I think they might just be looking for excuses to get out of it, or to get her off the case,” Ms. Walker said.

Leah D. Daughtry, a veteran Democratic strategist, said that the focus on Ms. Willis’s personal life was, in some ways, in keeping with the kind of attention that follows many in public life. But there is an added complication for Black women, she said.

“There are people who will be emboldened and invigorated by the fact that she’s a Black woman and make it, then, their business to go further and farther than they may have gone,” she said. It is “easy to argue that white men are not often held to the same scrutiny.”

She pointed to the many accusations of misconduct Mr. Trump has faced, including from Ms. Carroll.

“No one made that a disqualifier,” she said of the current Republican presidential front-runner. “But for Fani Willis, the fact that she’s in a consensual relationship with another adult person somehow makes her disqualified, or unqualified, to continue the work that she’s been doing. In that sense there’s a double standard, absolutely.”

Glynda C. Carr, the leader of Higher Heights for America, an organization focused on engaging Black women in politics, said she had been raised with the idea that Black women must be “twice” as good to navigate challenging dynamics in the workplace.

“Yes, we have a playbook about how we have to be twice as better, that we have to dot all the i’s and cross the t’s,” she said. When the public thinks Black women have made a mistake, she added, they “fall harder on the sword.”