Fulton County DA Fani Willis — home address and family info posted online during Trump Georgia case (2023)

What happened

On August 14, 2023, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis announced a 41-count RICO indictment against Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants over alleged efforts to overturn Georgia's 2020 election results.

Within days, Willis's personal contact information — home address, family members' names, and the home addresses of the 23 grand jurors — appeared on conspiracy-theory websites and far-right platforms. Some posts called explicitly for Willis and the jurors to be hanged and included images of nooses and gallows. The Fulton County Sheriff's Office assigned protective details to the grand jurors and to Willis's family.

How it started

The address-publishing step did not require any inside source. Willis's home address and her family members' addresses were reachable through standard people-search broker pages and public-records aggregation — the same lookup that returns a home address from a name for any first responder, prosecutor, or judge in the country. Once the addresses were posted, follow-on threats came in volume.

At least two individuals were federally charged and convicted for threats that followed the doxxing. Arthur Ray Hanson II of Alabama was sentenced in September 2024 to nearly two years in federal prison for threatening voicemails left for Willis and the Fulton County sheriff. Marc Shultz of California was indicted on two counts of transmitting interstate threats after posting that Willis "will be killed like a dog." Willis testified publicly that her staff had received hundreds of threats in the weeks after the indictment.

Why this case matters

The Willis case is one of the clearest publicly documented examples of the doxxing-then-threats sequence against an elected prosecutor. The address publication came first. The threats came after. The federal threat charges did not retroactively remove her address from the sites where it lived.

Georgia has no Daniel's Law analog covering district attorneys. Even if it did, Willis would still have needed someone — or some service — running the removal demands across hundreds of broker pages and re-running them every time the listing came back.

What this means for you

If you're a prosecutor, a judge, an investigator, or any other official whose work makes enemies the way Willis's did: the address-by-name lookup that fed the conspiracy sites is the same lookup that's running on you right now. The criminal charges that followed are reactive. They land months after the address has already been seen by the wrong audience.

Removing the broker pages before the high-profile case lands is the part that doesn't show up in the news. It's also the part that prevents the news from being about you.

For more on the doxxing threat shape, see /doxxing and /doxxing/recovery.

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