Against the advice of her lawyers, Fani Willis just gave an incredible display in court. Her rise to the stand in Georgia to defend herself against her surrounding foes played out like a scene from a latter-day Tom Wolfe novel. The erstwhile recipient of laudatory coverage from the New York Times, TIME magazine and the rest of the #Resistance media was now in the sights of an antagonistic case that the Gray Lady framed through a classically racist lens: the strong black woman, set upon on all sides by the judgement of mostly white and almost certainly racist southerners.
“I don’t really like wine to be honest with you, I like Grey Goose,” she said, responding to questions about payments for a “pairing” session with her paramour, Special Prosecutor Nathan Wade, to whom she funneled massive amounts of money in return for work for which he seems at best poorly qualified. “We are talking about sex,” Ms. Willis said with defiance in response to a line of questioning, before clarifying to a male attorney, “Mr. Wade, he’s a man. He probably would probably say [our relationship ended] in June or July. I would say we had a tough conversation in August,” because women measure the end of things by conversations, while men measure it by sex.
The scene was incredible, contentious and absurd. Ms. Willis claims with a straight face that in the course of a multi-year relationship with Mr. Wade, every one of his purchases — tracked to the nth degree to his misfortune by credit card and discovered during a contentious divorce from his wife — of flights, hotels, meals, sundries, gifts and other things he might not have been able to afford without the largesse of the State of Georgia were reimbursed from her own pocket. How? With cash, a veritable “horde” of cash — she bristled at the word and suggested it meant something else — that she kept in her home, hidden away, in response to paternal advice. She did not use this supposed cash to pay off her various tax liens, nor is there any bank record of it — instead, she suggested that she gets cash by overpaying at Publix, and she never uses checks.
Because Georgia requires the disclosure of any gift from anyone having business with the county of over $100 in aggregate, Ms. Willis must maintain that despite the lack of any records, she paid for her exact portion at least. She also is required by this obvious fiction to be deliberately vague about when the inappropriate relationship began and ended.
“[Mr. Wade] had a type of cancer that makes your allegations ridiculous… but I’m not going to emasculate a black man,” Ms. Willis said, when lawyers were questioning her relationship timeline, which may have started as early as 2020. When the defense lawyer responded: “I’m sorry, what? “I’m not going to emasculate a black man. Did you understand that?”, before again disclosing, in eminently emasculating fashion, that the question was not necessary because Mr. Wade was being treated for cancer at the time, and presumably could not perform his very private duties.
The thick accents of the Georgia lawyers served to inflame, but none so much as that of defense attorney Ashleigh Merchant, the original discoverer of the hot goss that Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade were an inappropriate item. Ms. Merchant’s law firm consists of herself, her husband and a paralegal — you can find it just across from a gas station in Marietta, Georgia. But when she was hired by a Trump case defendant so low down the list that MSNBC rarely uses his picture, she was not one to avoid following a lead — and what she found could wreck the entire Georgia case, setting it back months until after the election and resulting in terrible consequences for Ms. Willis.
“Let’s be clear, because you’ve lied,” Ms. Willis yelled at Ms. Merchant. “It is a lie! It is a lie!” It is unclear what she meant. But for the post-case framing, Ms. Willis’s play is obvious. First, she was the hero for anti-Trump media, a champion for the white ladies who buy books like the latest from Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman: Find Me the Votes: A Hard-Charging Georgia Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election (several sections of which were introduced to impeach Ms. Willis’ testimony today). Next she was the butt of consternation from the left — how could someone so under the microscope engage in such obvious and salacious misbehavior? And now, the tough, strong prosecutor pivots to the next act: martyr for the cause, a new Stacey Abrams, a strong black woman who intimidated the white (obviously racist) establishment by being not just hard-charging and anti-Trump but sexy and virile. Heaven forfend!
“Where’s Belize? What continent?” Ms. Willis inquired at one point. “I’m not being funny. I don’t know. I’ve been to Belize with [Mr. Wade]. I’ve been to the Bahamas with him. I’ve been to Aruba with him. Don’t embarrass me. I’m not sure what continents those are on.” You see, the racists are calling her stupid, too — so stupid she expects us to believe that everything seen today isn’t an act. What’s more troubling is: maybe it’s not?
