Black Power Archives/Getty John Floyd, the father of DA Fani Willis.
John Floyd is the father of Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney Fani Willis.
Willis’s father, a retired criminal defense attorney who wrote a movie script, was a leader in the Black Panther movement, according to South Atlanta Magazine. His full name is John Clifford Floyd. He is also known as John C. Floyd III.
Floyd took the witness stand during the motion hearing on February 16, in which attorneys are seeking to disqualify Willis from the Trump prosecution because of her romantic relationship with Trump special prosecutor Nathan Wade. Floyd introduced himself as a retired attorney who practiced in the areas of criminal and family law.
The New York Times calls Willis’s dad, “John Clifford Floyd III, a longtime civil rights activist and defense lawyer.”
Defense attorneys said that Willis’s lawyers “prepped” Floyd before his testimony. He said Willis was present and added that he knew of her testimony. Floyd said he listens to “conservative radio a lot” and “last night for five hours all they talked about was this case.” The judge said he would not strike Floyd’s testimony but that it could go to his credibility.
Here’s what you need to know:
1. John Floyd, Who Testified That Fani Willis Had a Different Boyfriend in 2019, Was Described by Fani Willis as a ‘Great Man’
Willis told The New York Post that she talks to her dad as much as 10 times a day.
“I have an absolutely amazing father and I’m very privileged to have been raised by such a great man,” Willis told The Post. “My father taught me that every single person is entitled to dignity and respect no matter who they are — no matter their race, religion or socio-economic status.
Floyd said he grew up in south central Los Angeles. “I’ve tried cases all over the country,” Floyd said on the witness stand. He said he was involved in a trial in Rwanda for the international court. However, he said his legal career was based in Washington D.C.
Floyd described how he came to live with Willis in 2019 during his February 16 testimony.
According to Floyd, he has one child, Willis. In 2018, when he retired from practicing law, he moved to South Africa because he helped with the free Nelson Mandela movement. However, in 2019, he moved back to Atlanta because of “political reasons” and lived with his daughter, Floyd testified. He said he lived with Willis and his grandchildren. “She was forced to move after she was elected,” Floyd said.
He said people showed up outside her house “cursing and yelling” and using racial slurs. She also received death threats, Floyd said. Floyd said he stayed in the house to protect it. As a result of threats against willis, Floyd said he hasn’t been able to see his daughter a lot recently.
Floyd said Willis had a boyfriend, who was not Wade, when he first started living with her, giving his name as “Deuce.” He said he would see the boyfriend “sometimes every day.” Floyd said he was a “disc jockey or something.” He said he did not meet Wade until 2023.
This testimony matters because a friend of Willis’s, Robin Bryant Yeartie, testified on February 15 that Wade and Willis started dating in 2019, contradicting their testimony under oath. They say the relationship began in 2022. Willis moved into Bryant Yeartie’s condo.
Floyd said he is currently living in California part of the time with a friend because he’s filming a documentary. Asked whether he spent time in California in 2019, he said he knew about COVID that far back. He said he moved out of Willis’s home in 2022.
Floyd said he knew Willis went on vacations, including a cruise, but she did not tell him she was going with Wade. “I did not know they were dating,” Floyd said of Wade and Willis.
He said that he and Willis did not confide in each other about their romantic relationships. Floyd said he only knew about Deuce because he was living with Willis at the time.
2. Fani Willis Described Her Father, Who Says He Wrote a Movie Script, as a ‘Very Afrocentric’ Black Panther
Willis told South Atlanta Magazine that her name was Swahili and chosen by her father, who was a Black Panther.
She told the magazine:
My father was a Black Panther. That was before he went to law school but kind of post-college. And so, yes, it’s something in our history I’m very proud of. He would come back here to the South and other places. In fact, his experiences of Georgia are that of the South. So, he’s kind of amazed as what he sees today.
My father will tell you that he’s been arrested so many times that he couldn’t even tell you … He could tell you the states but not how many times.
“My name is actually Fani (fah-nee), Taifa is my middle name, and my last name is Willis. So, my father was a Black Panther, so he was very Afrocentric… my name is Swahili. Fani actually means ‘prosperous,’ and Taifa means ‘people,'” she told the magazine.
She noted, “We’re not talking about material things in wealth, we’re talking about that stuff that really matters… I always remember my roots, that I come from a prosperous people, which are African people.”
Willis “was born in Inglewood, Calif., just outside Los Angeles, in 1971. Her father, John C. Floyd III, was a founder of the Black Panther Political Party in Los Angeles, of which Angela Davis was briefly a member,” the New York Times reported.
According to the New York Post, Floyd told the Black Power Archives project that he dated Angela Davis in the late 1960s and was a leader in the Black Panther Movement in California.
“On August 18, 1970, Angela Yvonne Davis became the third woman ever placed on the FBI’s Top 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list, sought for her supposed involvement in kidnappings and murders growing out of an armed seizure of a Marin County Courthouse in California,” History.com reported.
Floyd said on the witness stand that he was working on his “memoir.” He said he is trying to sell a movie script called “Bad Blood.” He said he went to Los Angeles to attend a Pan-African Film Festival.
3. John Clifford Floyd Gave His Daughter a File Clerk Job When He Was a Defense Attorney in Washington D.C.
Fani Willis’ dad is making a documentary
Floyd moved his daughter to Washington D.C. when she was in the first grade, The New York Times reported, adding that he had become a criminal defense attorney after noticing that lawyers who helped the Black Panthers “were always white.”
Willis’s father and mother got divorced, and her mother returned to California, leaving Willis with Floyd, according to The Times, which quoted her as saying that her father’s cases were “murders and dope boys.”
According to BET, Willis’s father “was a defense lawyer in the Washington, D.C. area” who “gave her a file clerk job when she was a child.”
She told South Atlanta Magazine:
One of the first things that my father constantly tells me is that everyone is entitled to dignity. And so that is something that I’ve tried to pass down. It is something that I impugn upon my staff. Everyone that we meet is not going to have the same education as us; They’re not going to have the same opportunities as us; the same in life experience, but they still have value. So that’s something I hope that I’ve imparted on my children. It is something that I demand of my staff. So that’s a lesson that he’s taught me that I hope to teach everyone I come in contact with.
I was about nine years old. I was being raised by a single dad. Our routine would be that on Saturday I would go to the hairdresser. But that would be after court.
“I tease him sometimes now that it was child abuse, because at 8, I was putting his criminal files together,” Willis said to The New York Times of her father.
4. Fani Willis Brought Up Her Dad John Floyd During the Motion Hearing, Saying He’s the Reason She Keeps a Lot of Cash, Which He Confirmed on the Witness Stand
John Floyd, Fani Willis’ dad, on his daughter keeping large amounts of cash on hand:
“I‘m not trying to be racist, but it‘s a black thing.”
During her testimony at the motion hearing on February 15, Willis said that she reimbursed Wade for trips they went on by using cash.
She explained that she always has a lot of cash in her house on the advice of her dad.
“It’s a Black thing,” Floyd said on the witness “Most Black folks, they hide cash. They keep cash. I was trained, you always keep some cash. I’ve been places just because of the color of my skin.” He said he took a fellowship at Harvard when Willis was 3-years-old and he went to a restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he had two credit cards and traveler’s checks.
The man would not take his credit cards or traveler’s checks, Floyd said. He said he told his daughter, “You keep six months of cash always.” He said he has three safes in his house. He said he gave “my daughter her first cash box and told her to always keep some cash.”
Under cross examination, Floyd acknowledged that Willis’s lawyers talked to him about the cash angle before his testimony.
Willis also explained that she was living with her dad, but he wanted her to move out because she was facing threats from gang members due to being district attorney.
Willis said her dad was “begging me to leave the house. He was afraid for me and his grandchildren.”
In her testimony, she indicated that she then sublet a condo from an old friend, Robin Bryant Yeartie, who testified that Willis and Wade started seeing each other romantically in 2019, which is earlier than both testified.
Trump and another defendant in the RICO case Willis filed are trying to get Wade and Willis disqualified from the prosecution because of the relationship. Wade and Willis say the romantic relationship started after Willis hired Wade to be a special prosecutor, paying his firm hundreds of thousands of dollars in public money.
5. John Floyd Once Called Police an ‘Occupying Army,’ Reports Say
GettyFani Willis and Nathan Wade.
Floyd once called police an “occupying army” that was “nothing but trouble,” the New York Post reported.
He also called a white politician a “Texas cracker,” the Post reported and “suggested that he believed conspiracy theories that Malcolm X was assassinated by the CIA.”
He told the Black Power Archives project, “I grew up here and I have remarked to myself: As many car break-ins, house break-ins, assaults, I never the whole time I grew up in Los Angeles ever remember anyone calling the police department, because we considered LAPD to be the enemy.”
Willis has shared posts about other family members.
In 2020, Willis shared a photo of her grandmother on Facebook and wrote, “Look at my pretty grandmother. She is in her late 90s killing it. I can only hope I am as smart and dynamic as her in this next half of life! #Loveher #Myidol.”
She wrote in another post that she lost her aunt to the “horrible crime” of domestic violence.
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