Ashleigh Merchant
speaker
547 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 28 Jul
Ashleigh Merchant’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The presence appeared under the tree and you didn't even know there was a tree that was happening today. So it's kind of surreal. You know, the impact of it, I don't think has quite hit me yet, but I'm very excited.
Yeah, definitely. So the Court of Appeals has said that they agreed with us that there was an appearance of impropriety and it was enough that Fannie Willis should not be on the case. So she and all of her deputies were disqualified. And so what that means practically is the case will be assigned to what's called PAC. It's the Prosecuting Attorneys Council.
And they'll be the ones that will review it. And I've said from day one, if we had an independent prosecutor, someone who wasn't financially or politically interested in the outcome of this case, it would never see the light of the day. It's not a case that would ever be brought. I mean, there's, you know, hardly probable cause. You could indict just about anything.
So you could find probable cause in just about anything. But I think if you had a neutral prosecutor looking at it, they're going to say, no way, this is ridiculous. We have other cases. This case is not, it doesn't rise to the level of a crime. You know, and we just don't think that this is where we should be prosecuting cases.
So I think that it will essentially die on the vine once it goes to an independent prosecutor. I don't think Fannie Willis is going to go away quietly, though. I've already got a notice of intent, just got it on email where she plans on appealing to the Supreme Court. So the question will be whether or not they even want to want to touch it. You know, it's a good opinion.
So I don't think the Supreme Court is going to have any interest in dabbling in this, but we'll see.
Georgia Supreme Court.
I don't think I'll be holding my breath for that. And I don't know that I've ever been called a liar so many times. And I just kept thinking, what is it that you think I'm lying about? Because just about everything that I've alleged has turned out to be true. And if something wasn't, it wasn't not true. We fought over the term cohabitate. We fought over the term whether or not you cohabitated.
And that was one of her big things saying, oh, I lied because they didn't live together. And I was using the Georgia definition of cohabitation that we have in the criminal code. If you spend the night together in someone's bed at their house, that's considered cohabitation under Georgia law. So, you know, that was the big, oh, you're lying because we didn't live together.
Well, you know, you cohabitate it. And so, you know, I think we were just playing with words at that point. But no, I certainly am not going to be holding my breath for an apology anytime soon. But I can't believe how many times I've been called a liar in the year 2024. I sort of feel like I should try and come up with a New Year's resolution having to do with that. Yeah.
I did. I mean, I thought that it was something that was large enough and something that was deep enough that it could effectively end it. But I knew that it would take some really strong judges to give us, you know, every step we had to win. We had to win a hearing. That was the first one, you know?
So when we filed it, and it's crazy because this time last year, I was writing the motion, you know, getting ready. I mean, I spent the holidays preparing it and, you know, editing it with my law partner, with my husband, and getting it ready to be filed in early January. And so, you know, with Terrence Bradley. Yeah. Talking to Terrence Bradley. Exactly. Talking to Terrence Bradley.
You know, he was away for the holidays. And I remember waiting until he got back from the holidays to sort of verify all the facts with him. But, you know, so it was a year ago thinking about what's going to happen with this. And I knew that we were going to have to fight. So we're going to have to take every step of the way. We're going to have another fight.
we had to make sure that the judge gave us a hearing because we needed that hearing, you know, and then we needed the judge to issue strong, a strong order. And even though judge McAfee didn't rule with us, he issued a strong order and he made factual findings that were really strong. Um, you know, I'd hoped that funny Willis would do the right thing, but she dug in.
Um, she did the expected thing, you know, knowing her, she dug in, but, um, So, you know, I knew that it had the potential to completely derail the case if we won it every step of the way. But I also knew that that was going to be a really long haul. And I knew that it was going to be something where they dug in a lot and fought. I mean, fought vehemently.
You've seen how much they wanted to keep this case. But, you know, one thing I want to point out is the more they dug in, the more you could see that they were biased because these are government employees. If most of the time, if you say a judge is biased or you say a DA is biased, they say, OK, send it to someone else.
You know, I mean, that's immediately when you file a motion to recuse someone or disqualify. Normally they're like, bye, because who wants more work when you're, you know, when you're a government salaried employee, you usually don't want extra work. So normally the normal response would be disqualify me, let someone else look at it.
I feel so strongly about the facts of my case that if you had a neutral and detached prosecutor, they're going to come to the same conclusion. So I don't need to have a personal stake in this case. So when we saw her dig in and not do that, that said all we needed to know. That said, you definitely do have a personal stake in this case.
Yeah. So I got to call him this morning and, you know, getting to make a call like that is pretty exciting. I'm not going to lie. That's a pretty, that's a pretty special moment. And so we definitely had a special moment. We were, we were teared up over it and in shock, you know, and, and kudos to him because I couldn't do it without him having the fortitude to fight.
I mean, he was offered a misdemeanor reckless conduct plea. He was offered one of the first pleas in this case and he rejected it. So he could have taken a plea last September, be done with this. And he had the guts to And I mean, he had to authorize me doing this, you know, had to authorize that me.
Showing 521–540 of 547 · page 27 of 28
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