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 indictment against Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants under Georgia's RICO statute over alleged efforts to overturn the state's 2020 election results.

Within days, personal information for Willis and her family appeared on a fringe website, including home and work addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, and email addresses. The names and addresses of the grand jurors who signed the indictment were posted alongside it. Some posts called for Willis and the jurors to be hanged and included images of nooses and gallows. The Atlanta Police Department and the Fulton County Sheriff's Office put protection plans in place for the grand jurors and Willis's family.

How the address became public

Publishing the addresses did not require an inside source. For most public officials, a home address can be pulled from people-search sites and public-records aggregation using nothing more than a name. That is the same lookup that returns a home address for a police officer, prosecutor, or judge across most of the country.

The federal threat charges

Two men were federally charged over threats to Willis. Arthur Ray Hanson II of Huntsville, Alabama, left threatening voicemails for Willis and Fulton County Sheriff Pat Labat on August 6, 2023, about a week before the indictment. He pleaded guilty in July 2024 and was sentenced in October 2024 to one year and nine months in federal prison. Marc Shultz of Chula Vista, California, was indicted in 2024 on interstate-threat charges after posting in October 2023 that Willis "will be killed like a dog." Willis has testified about the racist and violent threats her office received after the indictment.

Why this case matters

The Willis case is one of the clearest publicly documented examples of doxxing aimed at an elected prosecutor. The addresses were published first. The charges came later, and they did not remove the information from the sites where it had spread.

Georgia has not enacted a Daniel's Law-style statute that lets prosecutors or judges compel data brokers to take down their home addresses. Daniel's Law is a New Jersey statute that lets covered officials demand removal of their home address and unpublished phone number; several states have since passed versions of it, but Georgia is not among them. Willis's office was left with after-the-fact criminal charges and physical security.

What this means for you

If your work makes enemies the way a prosecutor's or judge's can, the address-by-name lookup that exposed Willis is the same one that runs on you. Criminal charges are reactive. They come after an address has already reached the wrong audience.

Removing your listings from people-search sites lowers the amount of address information available before a high-profile moment arrives. Frontline Privacy files those removal requests and keeps checking for your information to reappear.

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