Who is Fani Willis, the tenacious Georgia prosecutor behind Trump's fourth indictment?

Former United States president Donald Trump was charged by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis on Monday after a grand jury in Georgia produced an indictment accusing him of interference to rig the 2020 presidential election.

The charges brought up by Willis, add to the legal woes facing Trump, the front-runner in the race for the Republican nomination for the 2024 presidential election.

The largest case of prosecutor Willis' career will be the indictment of Former President Donald Trump for meddling in the Georgia 2020 presidential race, but it won't be her first divisive case.

Willis accused Trump of seeking to fraudulently overturn his loss in accordance with a law that prosecutors generally employ against organised criminal rackets. She is renowned for her tenacity in pursuing criminal cases.

"Rather than abide by Georgia's legal process for election challenges, the defendants engaged in a criminal racketeering enterprise to overturn Georgia's presidential election result," Willis told a late-night press conference after the indictment was filed.

In the past, Willis has successfully prosecuted instructors in Atlanta who used cheating techniques to raise their students' test results and had indicted well-known rappers for alleged criminal gang involvement.

“She’s not afraid of big cases,” said Gerald Griggs, a criminal defence attorney and president of the Georgia state conference of the NAACP. “She’s not afraid of going against popular opinion and public sentiment.”

Trump's indictment is of a different nature for a prosecutor whose office is concentrated on regional crimes in the Atlanta area. This is Trump's fourth indictment of the year, according to the case.

However, Georgian lawyers said the case will continue even if Trump is elected president in 2024 and the federal investigations against him are dropped or he self-pardons in those instances. Georgia is a state with a long history of voting rights struggles.

Prior to the indictment, Willis, a Democrat and the first female district attorney was subjected to a storm of criticism and occasionally venomous attacks from Trump.

Trump, who has denied wrongdoing, has criticised Willis' management of violent crime in Atlanta, the largest city in Georgia and a part of Fulton County, called her a racist and accused her of targeting him for political benefit.

Willis has aggressively used Georgia's anti-racketeering law, which was primarily intended to combat organised crime and is the basis of the accusation against Trump and his aides, throughout her career.

Willis worked as an assistant district attorney in Fulton County for the majority of her career, and defence lawyers and her peers see her as a supremely gifted litigator with a knack for winning over jurors. She left that position a few years later, but after triumphing in a contentious Democratic primary contest, she returned as its head in January 2021.

Willis, who is now divorced and the mother of two adult kids, was brought up in Washington by her father. Her father was a defence lawyer and a member of the Black Panther Party. 

After graduating from Howard University and the Emory University School of Law four years apart, she decided to continue her legal career in Atlanta.

“She’s really a tough-on-crime liberal, which is kind of a rare bird these days, but I think that’s her brand,” said Georgia State University law professor Anthony Michael Kreis.