Donnita Bryant wasn’t accused of pulling a trigger, taking part in a kidnapping or committing any of the other brutal crimes federal prosecutors have tied to the South Side street gang known as Faceworld.
But prosecutors say the mother of convicted Faceworld killer Diontae Harper joined her son’s campaign of intimidation and helped post a videotaped law enforcement interview on social media to brand a government witness a “rat.”
On Wednesday, a jury found Bryant and a Faceworld associate guilty of conspiring with Harper to retaliate against witnesses in his murder case — the latest development in a sprawling FBI crackdown that’s swept up at least a dozen reputed Faceworld members over the past three years.
Earlier this year, Harper pleaded guilty to a federal charge that accused him of firing into a car at a South Side gas station and killing a 22-year-old man in 2020. He also pleaded guilty on Aug. 17 to the charges in the witness retaliation case.
Bryant, who was a Chicago Transit Authority employee, was charged in the witness retaliation case along with Faceworld associate Markeeves Brooks and Michaela Richard, the mother of the daughter of Harper’s slain brother Naiqwon.
On Wednesday, the jury convicted Brooks but acquitted Richard.
Richard, a teacher’s aide in Bronzeville, was worried a felony conviction would scuttle her dream career as a teacher, said her lawyer, Christopher Grohman.
“She will be a productive citizen,” Grohman said. “She’s one of my favorite clients of all time. She’s ecstatic the jury was able to parse out the evidence.”
The trio were accused of arranging a social media post of a witness interview conducted by an FBI agent and a Chicago police detective in Harper’s murder case. The interview was uploaded on Instagram to an account with tens of thousands of followers, many of whom responded with comments such as “rat, rat, rat, want some cheese?”
The aim of the post, according to prosecutors, was to put a target on the back of the witness. In Chicago’s gang world, witnesses are sometimes killed for cooperating with the government.
“Donnita Bryant was eyes wide open that what they were doing was wrong,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jessica Ecker told jurors in her closing argument after a six-day trial.
But defense attorneys said the motive was innocent — to show that Harper wasn’t a rat and clear his name.
“It’s not a crime to stick up for your son,” William Stanton, one of Bryant’s lawyers, told jurors.
The case offered a window into the violence prosecutors say Faceworld unleashed on West Chatham and surrounding South Side neighborhoods — more than a dozen killings, the gang rape of a woman forced to drink bleach and Harper’s behind-bars campaign to expose government witnesses.
Faceworld, a faction of the Gangster Disciples, was named for a teen named Cornell “King Face” Henderson, who was shot to death in 2010. More than a decade later, prosecutors say, the gang was wreaking havoc across the South Side and suburbs, including Harper’s involvement in the May, 13, 2020, killing of Paul Harris at a GoLo gas station near 89th and Halsted streets. The gang has even been accused of killing two anti-violence workers.
The Faceworld investigation was part of a broader federal effort to rein in violence linked to Chicago gangs, some with equally odd names like Goonie Boss, Hobos and O Block.
Harper has admitted that while he was in jail in the Harris murder case, he mailed court-protected records involving government witnesses to his family.
Harper, an acknowledged Faceworld member, pleaded guilty in January 2025 to killing Harris. While in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, he got his hands on a protected 2023 grand jury transcript containing testimony from Keshawn “Flup” Wordlow, one of the witnesses against him and others in the gang.
But jail officials intercepted the transcript in the mail in April 2025, prosecutors said.
The next month, Harper was sentenced to 34 years in prison in the Harris murder case. U.S. District Judge Manish Shah told Harper that he failed to accept a basic rule of civilization: “Don’t kill.” The judge also said he’d considered Harper’s unsuccessful plot to mail out the transcript an “aggravating factor” in his sentence.
Harper, who originally faced the possibility of the death penalty, struck a contrite note in court.
“I was definitely caught up in the moment, in the lifestyle, in a way of living that made me feel and do wrong things, gain short-sighted benefits that only spiraled into more wrong things and more violence,” he said.
But prosecutors say that within weeks Harper was at it again — this time targeting another witness, Amonti McClure. Harper had approached McClure in jail and warned him he was in danger for testifying against the gang. On a recorded call, Harper said McClure and Wordlow were “gonna get stabbed.”
After his sentencing, Harper called his mom and told her that he planned to obtain McClure’s videotaped interview with the FBI and police. Harper then mailed out a CD of the recording.
Bryant, 47, Richard, 26, and Brooks, 29, were accused of working to get the footage to social media sites that focus on gangs.
“Now that he took 34 years, I’m gonna let the cat out of the bag,” Bryant said in one text message.
She told Richard: “They will see snitching not in our blood.”
On Aug. 12, 2025, Richard texted Martin Baba, owner of a “street-related” social media channel.
She explained that Harper, whom she called “Chubbs,” “had a few rats on his case” and wanted the McClure interview aired “to clear his name,” court records show. The next month, the interview was posted on Instagram on the Live With Baba TV account, which had more than 57,000 followers.
After his first attempt at mailing out Wordlow’s grand jury testimony failed, Harper was able to mail another copy to family members by putting a phony “attorney” label on the envelope to keep jail officials from intercepting it. But the contents of that transcript were never posted on social media, prosecutors said.
Defense attorneys stressed that while Harper wasn’t supposed to disseminate the grand jury transcript and the recorded interview because of protective orders, Bryant, Brooks and Richard weren’t bound by them.
The defense attorneys also noted that Bryant and Richard were cooperative with the FBI during a September 2025 search of Bryant’s home. They pointed out that FBI agents failed to take the copy of the McClure interview video during the raid, but Richard called them and they came back and got it.
Grohman, a former prosecutor with about 25 trials under his belt, said he’s never seen anything like that. He said it showed his client, Richard, “didn’t think she was doing anything criminal.”
The defense attorneys said the impact of the video being posted on Instagram was minimal, especially because McClure’s and Wordlow’s cooperation was already disclosed in court records that anyone could see.
“His nickname already is ‘The Police,'” said Lisa Marie Noller, one of Brooks’ lawyers.
Defense attorneys added that McClure was never physically harmed because of the video. And they said none of the defendants — Bryant, Richard or Brooks — mentioned a desire to physically harm either witness in their phone calls and texts.
But prosecutors said McClure felt like he was in “survival mode” with a “target on his back” and was having a difficult time sleeping. They said the goal of posting the video of the interview was retaliation — not clearing Harper’s name. And the danger was very real, they say.
In a case involving the Hobos, another violent gang on the South Side, federal prosecutors accused members of killing two government witnesses.
The two witnesses at the center of the Faceworld case — Harper and McClure — have cooperated with federal prosecutors with the hope of getting relatively light sentences. They’ve both pleaded guilty to federal charges involving gang violence.
McClure was a co-defendant in the Harris murder case and also confessed to a different killing.
Wordlow has admitted being a shooter in eight killings, including the Harris shooting and the fatal shootings of anti-violence workers Chantell Grant and Andrea Stoudemire. He also acknowledged that he took part in a 2020 gun battle outside Rhodes Funeral Home that left 15 people wounded.
The Faceworld retaliation case is only one piece of the federal assault on the gang.
In another case, Wordlow is one of five men accused of abducting a drug dealer, sexually assaulting the man’s mother at gunpoint and forcing them to drink bleach. Both survived.
In December, federal prosecutors unsealed a separate racketeering indictment against Harper’s older brother, the similarly named Dontae Harper, 28, and five other men allegedly tied to Faceworld. That case accuses the gang of 13 murders, as well as armed robberies and carjackings.