But Black people recognize this modern day spectacle of demeaning and dehumanizing treatment: Willis’ personal life scrutinized, her sex life exposed to public ridicule, her ways of handling money and relationships treated not a difference of culture or social class but as unethical and disqualifying.
Thank you so much for this, David. It’s all been extremely gross. This is all bullshit.
Don’t get me wrong, they made a terribly stupid decision to have gotten involved while prosecuting Trump. Of all the defendants in all the cases they’ll ever prosecute in their careers, this is the one where they needed to be the most flawless. They needed to have avoided even the hint of impropriety because these racist assholes will try to use anything they can to trash them and deep-six their case. They didn’t do that. They screwed up.
That said, if the case proceeds as scheduled, this isn’t going to hurt either of them or their case with an ATL jury. She’ll probably even get reelected. The notion that she hired her boyfriend, or a mere friend at the time, with the intent of scamming the taxpayers out of money by having him take her on lavish trips strains credulity and is a charge you’d never hear levied against a man, certainly not a white man. We’re to believe that this talented public servant who could be making several hundred thousand dollars more (than her current $200,000 yearly salary) in private practice set out on this seduction scheme to divert thousands of public dollars to her own pockets. As if she can’t afford to take herself to Belieze or such far-flung, exotic locales as {checks notes} CA wine country. Such accusations might as well include images of a scantily clad Willis depicted as Sapphire or Jezebel because they’re deeply rooted in misogynoir. For example, none of us would be a damn bit surprised if Trump is screwing around with Alina Habba, but I have yet to see anyone suggest that he’s doing so to divert money from the RNC or his campaign into his own pockets. That actually wouldn’t be all that farfetched!
To me, this is simple. They made a boneheaded mistake by getting involved while working on the same extraordinarily high-profile case, the same “trial of the century” (that’s never happened before lol). It was a really bad decision almost entirely because of the optics and how they’d be used to try to undermine the case. She’s the child of a Black Panther and she should have known that they would paint the relationship as two horny Black people who couldn’t control their animalistic need for sex and that she’d wind up being characterized as a gold-digging whore. That’s what they always call us. In reality, it sounds like a relationship was sparked between two kind of nerdy, attractive, single (one of whom was very newly single) lawyers working on a super high-profile case in which they were facing a mountain of threats while going up against one of the most powerful people on the planet. Then the relationship fell apart when she realized he was a bit of a hotep and that they had very different ideals about gender roles. Where’s the cheap, tawdry, bodice-ripping relationship? No attempt was made to hide the relationship or sneak around. They went out to dinner in public in Atlanta! He purchased tickets on credit cards he knew would be under the purview of his divorce proceedings. He paid for stuff, she paid for stuff. If you remove Trump from the equation, this sounds like dating in the 2020s. What’s remarkable is how incredibly benign and unremarkable it all is. As much as folks have tried to center a year-and-a-half romantic relationship around sex and turn it into some kind of seedy, dirty lusty fuckfest, it just isn’t that. It sounds like the latest Jennifer Aniston romcom, and I hate romcoms. Again, the decision to start a dating relationship was a terrible one, but some folks really need to examine why you felt the need to turn a fairly boring courtship into the latest Jenna Jameson porno flick. This ain’t that.