Scott McAfee, the cello-playing, What-A-Man-pageant-winning judge presiding over the only televised Trump trial, wants to avoid becoming “the next Judge Ito.”
A couple of weeks ago, Scott McAfee, the judge overseeing the election-related racketeering case against Donald Trump and eighteen co-defendants in Georgia, issued a surprising ruling: the trials would be streamed online and broadcast live on television. This was a departure from the criminal proceedings against Trump in New York and Florida. McAfee said the ruling was “in line with the spirit of transparency.” Some worried that it could allow Trump to turn the case into a televised spectacle.
“I declined,” McAfee recently recalled. “I was the lifeguard that always kept his shirt on.” He did, however, drop to his knees and put the cello’s strings to his mouth. Off campus, McAfee made money playing weddings and, once, by filling in for Janelle Monáe’s cellist during the recording of her first album. “I was in the basement,” he said. “I heard her warming up upstairs.” He went on, “The way it was edited, I came out of there sounding like Yo-Yo Ma.” Several months later, he bought the CD and eagerly skipped ahead to track sixteen. “They’d cut my two-minute intro,” he said. “But I still got a check for five hundred dollars from Atlantic Records.
Earlier this year, McAfee, who is thirty-four, was appointed to the Superior Court of Fulton County. In August, he was chosen for the Trump case by a random-selection process. The decision to televise the proceedings was in keeping with his typical courtroom rules.
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