A big problem arrived in Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis’s email inbox on the afternoon of Nov. 16, 2021.
It was a legal notice from an attorney representing Amanda Timpson, a former member of Willis’s executive staff who had been blowing the whistle on the district attorney’s office for allegedly trying to mishandle federal grant funds. Willis, the eight-page letter stated, had violated a slew of whistleblower protection laws when she reassigned Timpson to serve as a glorified file clerk following a brief meeting in July 2021 in which the district attorney refused to hear Timpson’s allegations. Timpson believed she had grounds for a lawsuit against Willis, but was willing to drop the matter in return for a modest severance package and a positive letter of recommendation from the district attorney.
Willis had other ideas.
“We are absolutely not settling this claim,” she wrote to her deputy chief operating officer, Dexter Bond, and legal counsel, Don Geary, at 7:14 p.m. that evening. Nearly two hours later, at 8:56 p.m., Willis sent another email to Bond and Geary directing them to hop on a conference call with the county attorney. “So much of the letter is inaccurate,” Willis wrote, according to records obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Willis, who later testified during a deposition in November 2024 that she hardly skimmed the first two paragraphs of the letter, fired Timpson in January 2022 on charges that she was derelict in performing her job duties and posed a physical threat to high-ranking members of her administration. Timpson, however, says she had a spotless employee record, and audio recordings obtained by the Free Beacon show the alleged threats of physical violence appear to be fabrications by Willis’s deputy chief of staff, Epiffany Henry.
The recordings, reported here for the first time, add to a growing body of evidence that Willis is running an office rife with dysfunction. Timpson alleges in a whistleblower lawsuit that Willis, after receiving her Nov. 16 legal letter, embarked on a retaliatory campaign to destroy her reputation. Her attorneys say her case, filed in August 2022, could go to trial as soon as July.
Lawmakers in the House, Senate, and Georgia state legislature opened investigations into Timpson’s whistleblower claims last year after the Free Beacon reported she had secretly recorded a private conversation with Willis on Nov. 19, 2021. During that meeting, Timpson informed the district attorney that one of Willis’s top aides had tried to misappropriate federal grant funds for “swag,” and computers. Willis did not dispute Timpson’s allegations, apologized to Timpson, and said the aide, Michael Cuffee, had “failed” her administration.
Willis now says Timpson’s allegations were incorrect. The district attorney testified during her deposition in November 2024 that Timpson was an “underling” who didn’t deserve an explanation.
“I don’t owe it to her—she’s an underling,” Willis testified. “I don’t owe it to her.”
Timpson’s case could mark yet another embarrassing setback for Willis. The liberal darling was once a rising star in the progressive legal world when she indicted President Donald Trump on state racketeering charges in 2023. She proved to be her own worst enemy, however, and the case derailed last year after an attorney for Trump discovered the district attorney had romantic entanglements with Nathan Wade, the man Willis had hired to lead the prosecution. A Fulton County judge forced Wade to resign from the case, and the Georgia Court of Appeals in December blocked Willis and her office from prosecuting the matter further after Trump’s victory in November.
Timpson’s whistleblower retaliation case centers around the actions of Willis and two of her top lieutenants, deputy district attorney Ramona Toole and deputy chief of staff Epiffany Henry, after the district attorney received Timpson’s legal notice in November 2021.
Two days later, on Nov. 18, Willis, Henry, and Toole sent emails to Timpson outlining a new work assignment. Timpson was to create a new behavioral health class for Willis’s pretrial diversion department, which would take the form of 10 course modules each containing at least 60 minutes worth of content, emails obtained by the Free Beacon show. Timpson said it was the first time she had ever heard of this task, which she was given 26 hours to complete. Her failure to complete the project would be tantamount to tendering her resignation, Willis wrote.
Timpson said it was an impossible task designed to give Willis the ammunition to depict her as an underperforming employee, a charge Willis repeated during her deposition in November of last year.
Timpson believed she was being set up to fail. The following day, on Nov. 19, 2021, Timpson secretly recorded two meetings, one with Willis and another with Henry, and Toole.
Henry said Timpson, during that meeting, expressed a desire to violently attack Cuffee, the Willis official she alleged had tried to misappropriate federal funds. Henry’s allegation, detailed in a memo dated Jan. 28, 2022, was sufficient for Willis to consider Timpson a violent threat to her staff. The district attorney had seven armed investigators escort Timpson out of her office on Jan. 14, 2022.
“Ms. Timpson made comments during staff meetings with myself and DeputyA DA Toole [sic] that she wanted to violently attack her previous supervisor and that ‘I’m from Compton, I don’t know how to response [sic] to emails, I be ready to fight, I want to punch him in the f***ing head,’” Henry wrote in the memo. “I started to fear for my own safety when dealing with Ms. Timpson because she had previously expressed to me that she wanted to be violate [sic] with her other supervisor. I do not take those types of statements lightly.”
Timpson’s recording of that meeting tells a different story. At no point during the 27-minute conversation did she threaten physical harm to anyone, nor did Henry or Toole indicate they felt physically threatened by her.
“Ms. Timpson never threatened violence and Ms. Henry invented words that Amanda never said, making her seem violent when she is not, and then Ms. Henry circulated false statements in a letter,” Timpson’s attorney, Mario Williams, told the Free Beacon.
Still, Willis maintains that Timpson posed a physical threat to her employees. “We were so afraid of physical harm,” the district attorney testified during her deposition last November. “I was afraid for Epiffany’s safety, but not just the safety of Ms. Henry,” Willis said, adding that Timpson “was disrespectful to Ramona as well.”
As for her allegedly poor work performance, Timpson says that too is a false narrative that Willis, Henry, and Toole worked together to create in response to her Nov. 16 legal demand to the district attorney. She cites her “spotless personnel file” and letters of recommendation from more than 30 of her former colleagues as evidence of her adequate performance on the job.
In January 2022, after Willis fired Timpson, Henry and Toole wrote memos detailing Timpson’s poor work performance and alleged threats of violence. Both highlighted Timpson’s failure to complete Willis’s Nov. 18, 2021, assignment to create a full 10-course behavioral health class in 26 hours as evidence of Timpson’s delinquency.
But Timpson says neither Henry nor Toole said anything negative in writing about her allegedly poor work performance until after she sent her legal notice to Willis on Nov. 16, 2021. Henry and Toole testified in depositions last year that they didn’t write up Timpson before that date because they didn’t want to harm her career.
Willis also spoke positively of Timpson’s job performance before she received the whistleblower’s Nov. 16, 2021, legal demand. The district attorney in August 2021 nominated Timpson to be the featured employee in her District Attorney Dispatch newsletter and weeks later, in September 2021, the district attorney praised Timpson in a staff-wide email, the Free Beacon reported.
Willis testified in her deposition in November of last year that her public praise of Timpson was an attempt to “make chicken salad out of chicken shit.”
“That’s the way I feel about this, she was a horrible employee,” Willis testified. “She had become an employee that lied, and the final straw was she became an employee that had other employees in fear.”
Timpson’s attorney said the documents obtained during discovery speak for themselves.
“There was never a single disciplinary action recorded in Ms. Timpson’s employment file before her termination or at any point throughout her four-year employment with the [Fulton County District Attorney’s office],” Williams wrote in an April 12 court filing. “Following Ms. Timpson’s termination, a new narrative emerged, laced with claims of a violent, potentially unstable person whom people feared, despite having a spotless personnel file.”
Willis spokesman Jeff DiSantis declined to comment, citing “ongoing litigation.”
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