We are all, alas, susceptible to lesser and greater degrees of regrettable moral lapses; it’s the price of being human. Most of these best-forgotten incidents fade away as time swallows them up and redeposits them into the fog of the past, where they lay dormant, silently waiting for some attorney to dig them up and throw them, under oath, right back into your face. Especially, these days, if you’re an elected official.
After two hours of watching the televised court proceedings alleging that Georgia’s election interference case against Donald J. Trump should be dismissed because of DA Fani T. Willis’ admitted affair with still-married prosecutor Nathan J. Wade, who Willis hired as part of her legal team in the election interference case. Hey, if the amorous pair used public funds from hard-working Georgians to finance their Caribbean trips, cruises and expensive dinners, they should be called to account. There’s far too much of that going around these days. But when the hapless Wade himself took the stand, defense attorney Ashleigh Merchant, who is defending alleged Trump co-conspirator Michael Roman in the case, dramatically peppered him with scores of questions so specific that I doubt I could have myself recalled the minute details of events routinely lived five years ago. Things like who paid for that dinner in Aruba and who paid back the non-paying party for his or her half, who made the plane reservations, who booked the hotel, who gave what gifts to whom.
Fair enough, how those expenses were paid could together point to a misuse of public funds. But, standing tall and combative, (though her whiney, high-pitched voice could never be called thunderous), Merchant’s questions for Wade predictably shifted to the salacious: When exactly did the affair begin, did you stay overnight in Willis’ house (wink wink), where did you get together to presumably do the deed, on and on. Given the dry and technical nature of most Trump-related trials, this was high theatre.
In a surprise and apparently unexpected move, Willis herself showed up to testify. Unapologetic and loaded for bear, she painted a credible picture of how she and Wade faithfully shared expenses for their private travel. She testified that their “romantic” relationship ended in August of last year. There was ultimately nowhere in the blizzard of times and dates aimed at both Wade and Willis that, in my view, uncovered a smoking gun that supported the pro-Trump defense team’s claim that Willis had hired Wade so that he could pay for their trips, dinners, and other activities on the Georgia taxpayer’s dime and, further, that Willis should be removed from the Trump case because of this perceived conflict of interest.
Candidly, it was refreshing to see Willis stand up for herself rather than cower under aggressive questioning doubtless designed to get under her skin. In the course of living your own life, could you remember who paid for what, with what money, at an informal dinner consumed four or five years ago?
I felt sorry for Willis, a clearly private professional black woman who lives with police protection because of threats against her (like having the “B” and “N” words spray-painted on her house) as she was asked about intimate details of her private life, including how her father taught her to always keep ample cash at home to use instead of plastic when possible. For those of us joined at the hip with our plastic, this may seem odd, but for many people this practice, especially for those who have lived through (or fear) perilous economic times, it’s a common hedge against financial disaster. When my mother-in-law moved to a care facility, for example, a thousand dollars were discovered under her mattress: low-denomination bills carefully collected and folded together over several years. Willis testified that she has “all her life” squirreled away cash in her home — not because she has to (“I make $200,000 a year”) — but because of ingrained advice from her clearly adored father as a sensible hedge against an uncertain future, especially as a single black woman: not as a way to hide expenses. A dramatic high note in all this was when, clearly pissed off, Willis said that she wasn’t the one on trial “…no matter how much you try to put me on trial. The ones [on trial] tried to steal the 2020 election.”
Touché.
I was a TV reporter back in 1979 when serial killer Ted Bundy’s trial in Florida became the first to be nationally televised. This was heralded as a great thing: Sunshine! Transparency! As a young reporter, I had my doubts even then as this trend proliferated and attorneys padded and dramatized their arguments, mugging for the cameras when they turned their way. Worse, the 24-hour news cycle was in its infancy and the Internet hadn’t been born yet so TV reporters, constrained by their half-hour noon, 6 pm and 11 pm newscasts, predictably lifted a handful of the most dramatic sound bites from all those hours of tape and led with them. It was the birth of American trials as theatre.
We’ve come a long way since a group of President Kennedy’s alleged paramours (there was no news coverage of it that I’ve ever found) demonstrated in front of the White House, publicly calling out his bed-hopping ways. At the time it would have been unthinkable to reveal such a personal thing about the President. Today, our elected officials are and should be held to reasonable standards of ethical conduct, to say nothing of general decency; but everyone also deserves some modicum of personal privacy. If Willis used her positional power to misuse public funds in the course of her affair with a subordinate, she should suffer its consequences. But prurient questions about the nature of her affair, which was after all between two middle-aged consenting adults — one single and one in the process of divorce — should stop at the bedroom door.
I didn’t watch every minute of the Willis trial but saw enough of it to conclude that if the conflict of interest charge, the real issue, proves insufficient to remove her from leading the election interference/racketeering trial against Trump and his co-defendant, that she keeps both her edgy moxie and whatever’s left of her private life to herself. And however tempting to amass clicks and viewers with splashy headlines, those of us with pens, audio feeds, and cameras in the courtroom should take the high road and report only the relevant facts of a case, letting any titillating, irrelevant details fall away, relegated to the fog of the past.
Thank you for this.