Judge Judy Is Still Judging You (Published 2019)

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.”