Sex, Love, and Trump Prosecutor Fani Willis

After two days of evidentiary hearings in the Georgia trial of Donald Trump for election interference, with a third to come, we’ve learned anew that love can make a person crazy. Sex even more so. And yes, a good man is hard to find. 

That being said, it’s still hard to fathom what Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis was thinking when she hired attorney Nathan Wade, a romantic prospect or romantic partner (timelines differ), as special prosecutor in a trial to hold Trump accountable for scheming to keep himself in the White House—a case parallel to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s federal one but with an important difference. If convicted in federal court, a future President Trump could likely pardon himself. If convicted in state court, he cannot. If Willis’s prosecution succeeds, Trump couldn’t weasel out of paying his debt to society for pressuring Georgia election officials to steal the 11,780 votes he needed to move the Peach State from Joe Biden’s column to his. 

Willis surely should have realized that her life was no longer private and that indicting Trump put a “Defame Me” sign on her back. If you’re in the limelight and take as much as a paper clip (let alone a man) home, it’s an episode of Scandal. If she had asked, “What hell could Trump unleash on me,” she would have gotten herself to a nunnery. That’s unfair when the indicted one is a serial philanderer and a jury-certified rapist. But that’s life. Had she shown more prudence, there would be no motion to disqualify, no grilling on the witness stand, no exposing her father to details of her sex life in open court. As it is, she’s on trial for having one. 

Last Thursday, she powered herself part of the way out of the corner she’d painted herself into with righteous fury at moments and sadness in others. The money she paid Wade for her half of their expenses (Willis paid for all of the Belize trip on the occasion of his 50th birthday) came from the “work, sweat, and tears of me.” Cash doesn’t leave an electronic trail of where you’ll be. (She moved out of her home briefly because of threats.) Then there’s family tradition. On the stand, her Dad, an attorney, said that, like many black families, he kept substantial amounts of cash—six months of expenses, in his case—in multiple safes and advised his daughter to do the same. Her testimony that she’s a cash customer got confirmation this week when a wine steward at a Napa vineyard told CNN that he vividly remembers Willis pulling out a roll of hundreds to pay for a $400 tasting at the Acumen winery. 

The defense was just as keen on establishing a dating timeline as who paid for what. Trump’s lead counsel, Steve Sadow, who has defined actual election interference as Willis putting candidate Trump on trial during the campaign, presented phone records purporting to show that Wade and Willis were in frequent contact before he got the job in 2021. But the list encompassed an area so wide—including an airport, apartment buildings, and restaurants—that calls within it proved nothing. Counsel then called Robin Bryant-Yeartie, a former employee in the DA’s office, angling to be the Linda Tripp of this affair, who said she saw the pair hugging and kissing, something strangers often do upon first meeting these days, to confirm there was a pre-employment relationship. Not only did she have scant proof, but Yeartie is a problematic witness who stopped speaking to Willis after she resigned rather than face being fired. 

There was a poignant interlude in this hot pursuit of a smoking gun. Wade testified that during the pandemic, he had cancer and stayed inside in sterile environments during the months in question. When Sadow pressed Willis on when they became intimate again later, she begged him to drop it. “Mr. Wade had a form of cancer that makes your allegations somewhat ridiculous. I’m not going to emasculate a black man. We shouldn’t discuss it further.”

None of this hair-splitting would be necessary if Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee had denied the motion to hold time-sucking evidentiary hearings when Georgia law doesn’t call for it. The Code finds a conflict of interest warrants disqualification only when a prosecutor treats a defendant for “an improper purpose or through improper means” to win. State courts have resoundingly rejected romantic relationships between attorneys as improper, even when attorneys are on opposite sides. 

Skip the irony that Trump is whining over two unmarried lawyers having a consensual affair. Close your eyes and conjure what an actual conflict of interest would be: the prosecution sleeping by night with Trump and secretly scheming by day to let him off in exchange for permanent guest privileges at Mar-a-Lago. Stop cringing. You can open your eyes now. By contrast, Willis and Wade’s affair while litigating is a confluence of interest. 

Ethics expert Norman Eisen, who served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, finds the allegations against Willis and Wade an internal matter “as irrelevant to the trial as allegations in other situations where prosecutors took office supplies for personal use or drove county vehicles for personal errands.” Under no circumstances, Eisen claims, does a personal relationship “bring a criminal prosecution to a stop.” I’m only a lapsed attorney, but with that, I find for the prosecution. Motion denied. 

But not denied by McAfee, an appointee of Republican Governor Brian Kemp, who granted the motion with little more than gossip to go on and no law to back him up. If judges granted a hearing on every complaint—your Honor, opposing counsel holds a grudge against my client for breaking up with his sister—trials would go on forever. 

The defense has another problem. The financial piece doesn’t add up. If Willis recruited Wade so she could line his pockets with enough disposable income to take her on lavish vacations as if she were a Supreme Court justice in a luxury Motor Coach, she failed. A mere $250 an hour is chump change to an Atlanta lawyer. Former Governor Roy Barnes testified that he turned down the position because he had “mouths to feed” at his firm and didn’t want bodyguards trailing him. Still, until the judge called it out of bounds, Wade was treated as a lawyer-with-benefits out of John Marshall Law School who’d hit the honey pot after a brief judgeship and founding a small firm. First, that’s an elitist argument that Trump’s thinly credentialed bunch of legal hires charging $750 an hour (with difficulty collecting it from their scofflaw client) should be ashamed to make. Plus, it’s flawed. A Harvard degree is no guarantee a graduate would know his way around a slip-and-fall case in small claims court or a multi-defendant racketeering one on the government’s side. 

As for favoritism in Wade’s compensation, there isn’t any. According to state records, 18 other special assistants made $250 an hour in 2022, and others took home the princely sum of $1,000 an hour.

What’s more, Wade took a salary cut. Under his contract, the hours he can charge the government are capped, while those he spends actually working are not. With no time available for his private practice, he’s taking in $5,000 less a month than he was. 

McAfee should have consulted Georgia law but could have also looked around. Willie Sutton said he robbed banks because that’s where the money is. Likewise, people fall in love at work because that’s where the prospects are. The inevitable is rampant and can’t be prohibited, only managed by a large industry of H.R. professionals, ethics committees, sexual harassment training, and adjustments to the org chart. 

Willis was angry at the defense for putting her in the docket with traces of regret for her part in ending up there. In a quiet moment, she said how lonely she was at times without offering whether she turned to Wade to help lift her out of it. In an answer to a question from Trump’s attorney, Sadow, about the relationship, she said it ended last summer. In a moment of restraint, Sadow left it there. 

Women were outraged at first for Willis letting them down, myself included, although it’s waned as more facts emerge. The remedy is for Georgians to vote against her in November, not for a judge to disqualify her in February. It behooves women to be thankful we’ve come a long way, but life isn’t level. This week, a frozen embryo was granted more rights. Flannery O’Connor lived in the Jim Crow South, rigidly divided by race and gender when she wrote A Good Man is Hard to Find. If you do find one, and you’re powerful like Willis, you may pay for it. 

It would be another miscarriage of justice in an ongoing series of them if an alleged treasonous felon, whose sexual indiscretions and violence, election interference, and delaying tactics are legion, got a Black prosecutor tossed off a case when she’s violated no section of the official Code of Georgia. If McAfee rules in Trump’s favor anyway, it’s not Willis who has a conflict of interest. It’s the judge. 

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