Fani Willis, the district attorney overseeing the Georgia prosecution of Donald J. Trump, searingly refuted allegations that she had a disqualifying conflict of interest.
She upbraided Ashleigh Merchant, one of the defense lawyers questioning her, alleging that Ms. Merchant’s court filings — which accused Ms. Willis of having a disqualifying conflict of interest stemming from a romantic relationship with Nathan J. Wade, the special prosecutor on the case — were full of lies. At one point her voice approached a yell, prompting Scott McAfee, the mild-mannered judge, to call a five-minute recess in an apparent effort to cool things down.
Elsewhere, Ms. Willis chided Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Steven Sadow, when he asked if she had been in contact with Mr. Wade in 2020. Noting that Mr. Wade had cancer at the time, she said, “I am not going to emasculate a Black man.”
She spoke of giving Mr. Wade a trip to Belize for his 50th birthday — earlier in the day, Ms. Merchant had asked Mr. Wade about the couple visiting a tattoo parlor there. She also admitted, in a digression that the lawyers’ questions did not seem to prompt, that she thought Mr. Wade had a sexist view of the world, and said it was the reason they broke up last summer.
“Mr. Wade is used to women that, uh, as he told me one time: The only thing a woman can do for him is make him a sandwich,” she said. “We would have brutal arguments about the fact that I am your equal. I don’t need anything from a man, a man is not a plan, a man is a companion.”
Her testimony unfurled in a courtroom that crackled with dramatic tension, and a peculiar mix of dread and titillation over the fact that a criminal case against a former president had taken a bizarre detour into a melodrama centered around questions about two prosecutors’ love lives — questions that Ms. Willis insists should have never been publicly aired in the first place.
