This past Friday night (June 21, 2019) on "Real Time" (HBO), Bill Maher's final "New Rule" (the concluding segment of every show) was to proclaim Oprah Winfrey as the ideal candidate to defeat the LK (Lyin' King) in the Oval Office in 2020. Read this profile of Judith ("Judge Judy") and think of an alternative to Oprah. If this is the (fair & balanced) fanboy's opinion, so be it.
[x NY Fishwrap "Zine]
Judge Judy Is Still Judging You
By Jazmine Hughes
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the following piece of writing
At least five days a week for the last 23 years, Judith Sheindlin’s head, neck and shoulders have appeared on TV. This means you know Sheindlin the moment you see her, even if you’ve never really watched her show. Her eyes, dark brown and wildly expressive, seem to grow three times their size when confronted with, say, the lies of an untrustworthy landlord or an unrepentant teenage troublemaker. Her eyebrows do a cartoonish slant from left to right, like an emoji meant to signal anger; her cheekbones, ordinarily sharp, soften whenever she purses her lips in disapproval, which is often. She wears a plain black robe with an ornate lace collar and occasionally slides on a pair of unrimmed glasses to look over legal documents. But all of it — the eyes, the brows, the lips, the face — has always been framed by a round pixie bob, virtually unchanged since the Clinton administration. So imagine my surprise when I walked into a ritzy hotel restaurant in Beverly Hills for my second meeting with Sheindlin — better known as Judge Judy — and found her wearing, for the first time, a clip-on ponytail.
I was among the first people to see it, on a February afternoon the day before that week’s taping began. The Judge is direct; a macher who doesn’t like to waste time. When she arrived, she asked me a series of questions that seemed open-ended but actually had right answers. The first was “Where are you staying?” The second was “How’ve you been?” The third: “Do you like my hair?”
There it was: a chestnut-brown hairpiece the size of a large man’s fist, unremarkable save for its sudden, unexplained existence. Sheindlin, 76, told me her hair was getting older as she was getting older, so she wanted to give it a rest from the constant styling. She called a few places and told them she was looking for a ponytail. It was so easy, she said, to just pop on the new hair in the morning. All she needed was a hair doughnut and a rubber band to make the ponytail; then she secured it with a bobby pin, and voilà, she was done. In fact, Sheindlin told me, her eyes widening in that familiar way, once we were done with lunch, she was going to go buy three more identical ponytails!
It gave her back some time, she said. There was less primping every morning and more time for the things she’d rather do: walking her dogs, reading the paper, watching CNBC to see what the implied open was in the markets. “Freedom that I haven’t had in 40 years,” she exclaimed. And all that for just $29.95! (She was still carrying the price tag in her purse.)
The next day — the first day of filming “Judge Judy” since this life change — a producer, her makeup artist, her publicist and the occasional grandchild sat in her dressing room and watched her tape three episodes, all eyes glued onto the ponytail, tracking its every move like a tennis match. Her eyebrows jumped up; the ponytail remained in place. Her head whipped around; the ponytail stayed clipped on.
At one point that afternoon, David Theodosopoulos, the executive producer of “Hot Bench,” another legal show created by Sheindlin, bounded into the room, looked at at the judge on the monitor and stopped in his tracks: “When did this happen?” When those episodes finally aired in March, so many people complained about Sheindlin’s ponytail that the moderator in one of her Facebook fan groups — 15,000 people strong — posted a stern warning: “We’ve had enough of dealing with the negativity surrounding Judge Judy’s choice to change her hairstyle a month ago. We will no longer be approving any further posts about this change, and any comments about it will be deleted.”
Sheindlin thought she deserved an adventure. “I get up in the morning, and I look in the mirror, and I say, When did my young person start to inhabit this old person’s body?” The shift was meant to match how she felt inside. In the last two decades, “Judge Judy” has won three Emmys and become the highest-rated daytime TV show in syndication. It accomplished all this without changing much of anything since its debut — it has the same talent, the same set, the same spectrum of human emotions — mostly because there has been no need, so completely has it dominated. But it made sense, after all these years, to finally take a gamble, because what did she have to lose? As Amy Freisleben, the co-executive producer on the show, told me, “You came here on a very momentous week.”
If you’re usually at work all day, you might not know this, but “Judge Judy” is almost certainly on TV right now. The show has aired consistently since 1996, and it has been the highest-rated program in first-run syndication for the last 10 years. Two years after its debut, “Judge Judy” started to beat “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in the ratings, and it continued to crush Winfrey for 13 years straight. While many people watched Winfrey famously give out hundreds of cars or sit next to Tom Cruise while he was jumping on her couch, more people were watching Sheindlin, even in Winfrey’s last season. Now that “Judge Judy” is in its 23rd season, nearly 10 million Americans watch her each day. By comparison, “Ellen” averages about 2.9 million viewers; “Dr. Phil,” about 3.9 million viewers.
The format of “Judge Judy” is familiar to anyone who has ever been home sick or in a doctor’s waiting room: There are usually two cases per episode, found by 65 researchers who sift through national small-claims-court motions. The litigants defend themselves, and the show pays any judgment Sheindlin renders, as well as travel and lodging, on the condition that they won’t appeal the Judge’s decision in a real court. (Though Sheindlin was a real judge for decades, in the context of the show she serves as an arbitrator.) There’s a court audience, consisting of actor types hired for a steady gig. Her bailiff, Petri Hawkins Byrd, is Sheindlin’s trusted comedic sidekick, with whom she honed a rapport when he served as her bailiff in Manhattan Family Court.
Among women between the ages of 25 and 54 — a coveted TV demographic — who watch daytime TV, “Judge Judy” is the favorite. Strikingly, the program is the second-most-popular syndicated show among black and Hispanic viewers, surpassed by only Steve Harvey’s “Family Feud.” Black women watch the show at nearly twice the rate that white women do. The show is regularly named in people’s obituaries. (“He also enjoyed woodworking, crossword puzzles and watching ‘Judge Judy.’ ”)
Dee Ireland Lewis runs the Judge Judy Rocks! Facebook group, which has more than 33,000 members. He has been watching for over 20 years. “The appeal is her quick wit, knowledge of the law and the no-nonsense manner in which she operates,” he wrote to me in an email, adding, “I think she is not only wise and fair, but underpaid for what she has to deal with on a daily basis with some of these cases.” (Sheindlin’s reported net worth is $400 million.)
Over the years, the Judge’s exasperated reactions — tapping her watch, rolling her eyes — have become part of the internet’s lexicon, go-to memes to convey annoyance. In 2004, VH1 named her one of the greatest pop-culture icons; in 2013, a Reader’s Digest survey found that more Americans trusted her than any sitting Supreme Court justice. When she received the Emmy lifetime-achievement award in May, Adam Sharp, president of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, released a statement in which he praised her for epitomizing the “excellence and vibrant diversity of daytime television programming.” The comedian Amy Poehler is such a fan that she requested to present Sheindlin with her award. Sheindlin, Poehler told me, would be a bad politician, which is why she loves her. “She tells the truth, and she makes decisions based on what she thinks is right, not what other people think.”
Other famous fans include the comedian Amy Schumer, the rapper Nicki Minaj and RuPaul Charles, the host of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” who has cited Sheindlin as a major inspiration. He described “Judge Judy” to me as a “sanctuary for rational critical thinking.” He started watching the show as soon as it premiered, intrigued by the similarities between Sheindlin and his mother, who died a few years before its debut. Both women, he said, had the same “BS detector.” “It can be very discouraging to see and hear how much rhetoric is being shoveled out and spun, and how much of that crap is consumed as true,” he said. “But you have half an hour or an hour of ‘Judge Judy’ as an alignment, as an adjustment, so that you know where you stand.”
The guiding logic of “Judge Judy” is that Sheindlin fundamentally understands people and their intentions, perhaps even better than they do. Viewers delight in her “Judyisms,” the string of insults she unleashes when she realizes that someone is motivated by greed or stupidity or another mortal sin: “On your best day, you’re not as smart as I am on my worst day,” or “I want first-time offenders to think of their first appearance in my courtroom as the second-worst experience of their lives, circumcision being the first.” She is acidic and surly and cruel; she is obsessed with competence, has no patience for equivocating and appreciates good manners — she’s the only person I’ve ever seen rip someone to shreds and call him “sir” at the end. Once, she threatened to kick an entire audience out for not taking the case seriously; another time, she cackled so maniacally that the young man in front of her ran from the courtroom, saying he was going to be sick. It works, though, because she is wickedly funny. “If she were a stand-up comedian, her timing would be impeccable,” says Randy Douthit, the executive producer of the show.
Sheindlin believes that the human condition is a collective one and that good people act accordingly. People who don’t appreciate a sense of community? They are the problem. “Ever been on a boat and you see these plastic bottles, and you see condoms on the beach?” the Judge asked me. “To me, that’s a death sentence.” For viewers, “Judge Judy” seems to embody the golden rule, providing a rigorous system of ethics that is hard to find outside a church or a family dinner table. Freisleben, who has worked on the program for 21 years, thinks Sheindlin’s black-and-white approach is why people continue to watch. “There’s so much gray,” she says. “I think people just want to listen to somebody who’s just going to say it straight and be honest.”
Sheindlin posited a scenario to me in which we’d have to decide whether a man who grabbed my pocketbook on my way out of a theater one night should have to go to prison. Your life would never be the same again, she told me — so why should his? Carmen Lopez, a regular contributor to the "Judy Judy Rocks!" Facebook page, told me that Sheindlin puts a human face on those who suffer when people try to take advantage of a public system. Sheindlin’s popularity is easy to understand within this context, especially among women of color: She creates a world in which prejudice has no power and people are rewarded or punished simply for their actions, not for who they are.
The first thing Sheindlin ever said to me, when I greeted her in culottes, was: “You’re going to be cold.” It was January, but we were in Florida, where, after decades of enduring New York’s bitter cold, she now lives a majority of the year. (She refers to this as the “migratory path for Jews.”) She got out of her car — an immaculate Bentley the color of a Werther’s Original — and rooted around in her trunk to find me a sweater amid her collection of Lionel Richie and Frank Sinatra CDs. “Lucky for you,” she said, handing me a sweater, “we’re the same size.”
She drove us past the well tended lawns and ornate fountains of Naples until we arrived at two wrought-iron gates: the Ritz-Carlton. “It gets you out of the house,” she said of her membership. Sheindlin usually spends her mornings there; her husband, Jerry Sheindlin, rides over on his motorcycle — the Judge’s 85th-birthday present to him — in the afternoon, and he drinks a chocolate protein shake while she has her lunch. On our way up to the hotel’s roof, we took a detour through the gym, where she spends an hour and 20 minutes every day — walking on the treadmill, then 10 minutes of stretching, then crunches and weights. “I don’t hate getting older,” she told me, as the elevator doors closed. “I just hate looking it.”
The most striking difference between Sheindlin-on-TV and Sheindlin-in-person is that she is quite petite, which is easy to forget, as viewers usually see her sitting down. We took our seats at a small table in the shade. Sheindlin wore a tan jacket, white jeans, Barbie-pink lipstick and diamond earrings the size of my ring finger’s nail; she sat straight-backed, fingers clasped before her like a Mafia don, leaning forward and dropping her voice conspiratorially whenever she wanted to underscore a point. Her thick accent — she and Bernie Sanders graduated from the same Brooklyn high school, James Madison — was underscored by her wild and consistent gesticulations. She waved her hands around when she was excited, slapped them on her thighs when she was amused, beckoned toward an invisible man to make a point, pushed that man away when the point had been made. I asked her if she had any questions for me, because I was going to be asking her a lot of questions over our time together. “You’re a smart lady,” she said. “I assume that before this interview, you did research?” I nodded. “So did I.” Then she ordered a turkey wrap.
Before she was Judge Judy, she was Judge Sheindlin, serving in the New York Family Court system from 1982 to 1996. “My gift, if you can call it a gift,” she told me, “is that I understand what motivates people.” Humans, she said, still and always have the same palette of emotions to deal with — anger, sadness, happiness. In fifth grade, she received a “U-note” in school — for unsatisfactory behavior — which had to be signed by her parents and returned the next day. She still remembers the feeling of walking home with that note, knowing that she would have to show it to her parents, and how bad it all felt. “When that feeling becomes anesthetized, then society is really, really screwed,” she said. She pointed to the #MeToo movement. “For so many years, there was no consequence for bad behavior. Now: You lose your job! And hundreds of millions of dollars! And you can’t make money for a while, and you can’t get a gig at a club. And we don’t care who you are. Nobody is indispensable.”
We finished lunch and moved to a cabana by the pool, joining her stepdaughter, Nicole, and Nicole’s son, Alexei, who were visiting from Westchester and killing time before massages. Nicole sat barefoot with a fresh pedicure, her aviators and watch glinting in the sun; Alexei, dressed head to toe in athletic wear, towered over all of us, even while sitting. Nicole told me about the first time she met Sheindlin, when she was 8: She came home from school to a car she had never seen before in her driveway. Her father and Judy had recently gotten together; at the time, Jerry was a defense attorney, and Judy handled juvenile-delinquency and child-support cases for New York City. Jerry explained: “You know how I’m a lawyer, and I try to get people out of jail? You see her? She puts them in jail.” That was that. Judy was in.
Three of Judy and Jerry’s five children are lawyers, as is one of their 13 grandchildren. At least another three are considering careers in the law. Disputes are the family’s love language. At one point, Sheindlin and Alexei disagreed about whether men are capable of prioritizing others’ needs. Alexei told her that there are men in the family — like his dad and brother — who can do just that. Sheindlin grew animated; now she could do what she did best. She started to cross-examine her grandchild, repeating each of his sentences back to him slowly and sharply, punctuating them with phrases like “Is that a fair statement?” in order to, in her own way, tear them to pieces. Alexei sputtered a defense, but then the Judge presented her argument: Jerry and Judy know that Alexei needs to be taken out for breakfast when he wakes up. Judy takes him as soon as he’s hungry; Jerry fits it into his own schedule — because he’s a guy, she said, and that’s what guys do! Alexei was resigned: He knew he was right, but this wasn’t the hill to die on. (He’s one of the prelaw grandchildren.) Judy, satisfied, doubled over with laughter.
During lunch, I asked Sheindlin, a former crime-and-crack-era New York judge, about broken systems: I wanted to know, after so many years on the bench, if she thought systemic failings or individual ones were what put people in front of her. “I don’t know how you deal with systemic irresponsibility,” she answered. “It’s beyond my pay grade. I think it’s much easier to deal with the individual.” After watching them argue, I wanted to know whether Alexei, a millennial like me, was comfortable considering ethical behavior on a grand scale. He said it was easy to be idealistic about people’s intentions but hard to rebut a lived experience, especially when it was his grandmother’s.
Alexei’s youthful optimism had floundered against Sheindlin’s staunch realism. There’s no way she could know every nook and cranny of a case — she considers only the facts right in front of her. It was too easy to get lost in the minute details of an emotion. This is why she went into law in the first place: You know only what you know.
Like most confident and successful women she knows, Sheindlin adored her father, and her father adored her. She was born to a German-Russian Jewish family in Brooklyn in 1942. Though she finished high school a semester early, she claims not to have been particularly academically gifted, not doing well in “touchy-feely” classes like philosophy. “I was smart enough,” she said. “I came from Brooklyn, so I knew how to cross the street in traffic.” She attended the school of government and public administration at American University in Washington, which had a program that allowed undergraduates to enroll in the law school upon completing a bachelor’s degree. She was one of only a handful of women in her graduating class. She understood the law and excelled in her courses — but then she met the man who would become her first husband in 1964, a time when most women followed their husbands, even if the woman was at the top of her law-school class and the man only had a job with Legal Aid in New York that, she says, paid $75 a week. Sheindlin married and finished her degree at New York Law School.
At first, she worked as a corporate lawyer, but she didn’t find any pleasure in it, so she quit and became a stay-at-home mother. Then she divorced. A law-school acquaintance encouraged her to apply to an opening in the New York Family Court system. She prosecuted juvenile-delinquency and child-support cases around the city — “lots of beaten children, lots of starved children, lots of children who were sexually molested” — and sharpened her obsession with personal responsibility and strong family structure. (Indeed, talking to Sheindlin sometimes felt like talking to a Bernhard Goetz-era copy of The New York Post come to life.) Unlike some of her contemporaries, Sheindlin didn’t believe in putting the blame on the state or the system. “While you can blame the system for not being more vigilant about taking care of these children and hiring people who are less qualified or capable of being overwhelmed, I’m always a big believer in ‘the buck stops right there,’ ” she said. “The person that abuses that child is responsible.”
Mayor Ed Koch appointed her to a Family Court judgeship in 1982; four years later, she was made the supervising judge of Manhattan Family Court at 44. In the meantime, she had married Jerry Sheindlin, whom she approached at a bar, sticking her finger in his face and demanding to know his name. They divorced briefly in 1990, soon after her father died, but reconciled within a year. (“Most men are alike,” she once said in an interview. “Mine had hair!”) Jerry was also a judge, serving in the city’s Criminal Court and then the state’s Supreme Court. They raised their family of five children in the Bronx.
In 1993, Josh Getlin, a reporter for The Los Angeles Times, was working on a series on Americans who were shaking up bureaucracy. His wife, Heidi Evans, then a reporter for The New York Daily News, suggested Sheindlin, one of the few judges who allowed reporters in her courtroom. Getlin’s article — headlined “Law and Disorder: Tart, Tough-Talking Judge Judith Sheindlin Presides Over the Grim Pageant of Dysfunction Known as Manhattan’s Family Court” — brought her national attention. In it, Sheindlin quotes a Jewish woman who describes her experience in Sheindlin’s courtroom as “worse than being at Dachau.” Soon after, “60 Minutes” filmed a segment on her at work, during which she is caustic, her patience nonexistent. At one point, a lawyer, exasperated by their exchange, mouths a word that the host cheerily explains “rhymes with witch.” The voice-over describes her as the fastest judge in the system, overseeing nearly 300 cases a month, before cutting to a shot of Sheindlin in chunky earrings and a gold watch, power-walking on a treadmill, her brow furrowing more with each step.
After all the celebrity — and by this point, after hearing 25,000 cases — Sheindlin retired from Family Court and wrote the first of her seven books, this one with Getlin, published in 1996: Don’t Pee on My Leg and Tell Me It’s Raining. Then TV came calling. “The People’s Court” with Judge Joseph Wapner, the only major courtroom show at the time, had recently been canceled. Sheindlin met Larry Lyttle, at the time the head of the production company Big Ticket Television, who agreed to shoot a pilot for a new courtroom TV program. The show debuted in September 1996, showing on any channel that would take it; within three years, it reached the No. 1 slot in daytime TV.
The difference between the world in which “The People’s Court” was canceled and the one where “Judge Judy” succeeded is a simple one: O.J. Simpson. His trial renewed public interest in the court system and introduced a newfound ability for cameras to nose into people’s most personal business. Daytime TV had turned deeply emotional, powered by Oprah Winfrey, who had tissues, and Jerry Springer, who had security. Sheindlin, in turn, had no patience for fuss. Her show neither coddled nor exploited sob stories — it just cut through them to get to the truth.
Last year, Sheindlin was named the country’s highest-paid television host, making $47 million a year for 52 days of filming, or about two days a week every other week. Every three years, Sheindlin has dinner at the Grill on the Alley, in Beverly Hills, with the president of CBS Television Distribution to discuss her contract. Sheindlin writes down the salary she wants, seals it in an envelope and presents it at the end of the meal. Once, a president presented her with his own envelope, which she refused to open: “This isn’t a negotiation,” she told him. She sold the rights to the show’s library to CBS in 2017 for a reported $95 million. Her production company also co-produces the other top legal television program: “Hot Bench,” a three-judge joint deliberation, which Sheindlin created in 2014. It’s now the third-highest-rated syndicated show on daytime, after “Dr. Phil” and, of course, “Judge Judy.”
Though “Judge Judy” takes pains to make you believe that Sheindlin is sitting in a courtroom in New York, the show is filmed on a sprawling lot off Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. The set is mostly burgundy, with wood-paneled walls and gold-plated lamps and wall sconces. Behind Sheindlin’s bench, the wall is constructed like an Advent calendar, with false doors and cutouts, so that the camera can pop through and examine documents in Sheindlin’s hand. Litigants stand behind two wooden lecterns, a jug of water and a few glasses before them.
“From Prison to Nanny,” the first case on a Wednesday in February, featured Elizabeth O’Farrell suing her former friend Christopher Clokey for six months’ rent, assorted costs related to his postprison relocation and a dispute over a false restraining order. He countersued, claiming that O’Farrell had deposited his disability check while he was living in her home.
Sheindlin seemed to be siding with O’Farrell from the start, but she kept raising her hand or butting in with additional incriminating information; even in her attempts at silence, she emphatically nodded along to the Judge’s remarks, signaling some sort of relief, until suddenly Sheindlin snapped. “I don’t want you to shake your head,” she said. “I don’t want you to do anything. This is my job.” Though Sheindlin dismissed the defendant’s claims, saying that the plaintiff deserved the money from the disability check, neither O’Farrell nor Clokey came off as likable. In the wings, the cameraman next to me sighed: “I’m tired of this case.” (Byrd, Sheindlin’s bailiff, was surreptitiously doing the crossword just out of the camera’s frame.) Clokey stressed his contributions to the plaintiff’s home, contending that he wasn’t being paid fairly. Sheindlin pounced, asking him if he reported that income to the Social Security Administration. He began sputtering, until it was clear that he hadn’t. Sheindlin laughed a villainous laugh — a single, condescending “Ha!” — and walked out. O’Farrell called after her — they hadn’t even gotten to the false documents yet! He had filed an illegitimate restraining order! Sheindlin was already back in her dressing room.
Her “real chambers,” as her team calls them, are filled with signs that say things like “I hate when the liar’s pants don’t actually catch on fire” or “Enjoy life, this is not a rehearsal” or “You can’t fix stupid.” A framed photo of her at a charity event with Octavia Spencer and Samuel L. Jackson sits on her desk. (Jackson and Sheindlin are good friends.) Sheindlin’s team was sitting on couches, having just watched the case unfold on a large flat-screen TV, as they do with all her shows. They watch as if the cases were major plays in a sports game, even talking back to the TV screen. When a litigant contended that she had paid the contested sum over Venmo, the money-exchange app, someone in the room yelled, “She doesn’t know what Venmo is!”
Between cases, Sheindlin might sign a few autographs or catch up on some emails, but she mostly plays gin rummy, a game she usually wins. Stapled onto the back of a small whiteboard are several pieces of paper that Sheindlin and Meg Balian, a program executive, have used to keep track of their scores from the last 18 years, annotated with comments like “Judy at the 11th hour decides to reshuffle the game! Smoke is coming out of Meg’s ears!” On the most recent page, there were four wins for Meg and 12 for Sheindlin.
The Judge read a fan letter — she receives dozens a day — aloud to me in her dressing room. In it, an exasperated woman told the story of having to provide for various unemployed family members who weren’t contributing to the household. One day, she finally hit her limit; she described Sheindlin’s spirit “entering her body” (I imagined Patrick Swayze entering Whoopi Goldberg in “Ghost”) so that she could set her family straight, demanding that they get jobs or find a cot at the shelter. Would you believe it, they all got jobs! The letter finished, in all caps, “thank you for the influence in my life.”
Eventually, her break ended, and the Judge reapplied her lipstick and strode back to the bench, her jeans and sneakers just visible beneath her court robes. When she re-enters her chambers, she has to walk through a small landing, hung only with a full-size mirror and some laminated, homemade sheets that read “congratulations #1 court show 2014-2015 season” and “congratulations on 5,000 episodes — here’s to 5,000 more.” The only things she keeps behind her bench are a handwritten letter and a newspaper clipping denouncing the dangers of pit bulls, which she has long detested; a staff member’s relative was recently mauled to death by several of them. Nothing makes her angrier than an innocent person harmed by an avoidable danger — why wouldn’t she do everything in her power to stop it?
In April, I caught a nasty cold, so I lay in bed watching reruns of “Judge Judy.” I reread a section of one of her books and could feel my facial muscles forming a rictus when I got to certain passages, like the one in which she called women “master deniers” and conceded that people who had suffered domestic abuse were victims but also “dopes.” Absent from Sheindlin’s late-’80s absolutism was any sort of nuance: a recognition of root causes or context, an understanding that there is a multitude of reasons that, say, a victim of domestic abuse might not leave her abuser. In a 2009 interview for the Television Academy Foundation, Sheindlin told an interviewer: “While I recognize that some of the people who I prosecuted in family court didn’t have the same kind of advantages that I did — a loving home, two parents who pushed me in the right direction — that did not excuse the bad behavior, because 95 percent of the other children who were brought up in the same environment did not go out and hit people. If they did, there would be chaos in the streets all the time. And I always found it irritating and almost disrespectful to the community that the court was serving to say: ‘Well, what do you expect? They come from this type of home.’ ”
Before she ever went on TV, she saw plenty of people change over the years, plenty of parents who completed addiction programs or found gainful employment in order to regain custody of their children, or kids who had straightened up and stopped causing havoc. It wasn’t that Sheindlin didn’t have empathy, as I had feared — it’s that she has standards. She told me once about a beloved friend who had gained weight; Sheindlin set up a weekly weight check-in with her, for two years, to make sure she was staying healthy. She was concerned about her friend’s health but also her life — they were all getting older and had to take care of themselves. Yes, that’s overbearing — but isn’t it better than doing nothing at all?
Sheindlin cites her life as an example of the American dream; she took what she was given and made the best out of it. “I really think that everybody should be entitled to a fair shake,” she told me. “If, for any reason, you’re denied that fair shake, I’m offended.” Through her career, Sheindlin saw the chaos of children being abused and children being starved and children being beaten, and then the chaos of neighbors feuding over property damage and former lovers arguing over credit cards and old friends trying to settle debts, and despite it all, she knew that we could do better. And for the past 23 years, at least five times a week, she makes sure that we do. ###
[Jazmine Hughes is an associate editor for The New York Times Magazine. Previously, she worked as a contributing editor for The Hairpin, a blog. In addition to The New York Times, Hughes has written for The New Yorker, Elle, Gawker and The New Republic. She received a BA (government) from Connecticut College and served as editor-in-chief of The College Voice (campus newspaper).]
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