Agents Of Deep State Accuse Federal Judge Of Viewing Porn On His Private Computer

                        (Judge Alex Kozinski, Chief Judge on the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals)
Judge Alex Kozinski a federal judge, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, resigned January 1st, 2018 after multiple former clerks and junior staffers came forward with allegations of sexual misconduct against him. These charges had been made, investigated, and dismissed in 2008.

Judge Alex Kozinski was for many years Chief Judge on the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals, will resign immediately, according to a statement released by his attorney.

He apologizes for his actions but also defends his "broad sense of humor."

"I've always had a broad sense of humor and a candid way of speaking to both male and female law clerks alike. In doing so, I may not have been mindful enough of the special challenges and pressures that women face in the workplace. It grieves me to learn that I caused any of my clerks to feel uncomfortable; this was never my intent," Kozinski wrote.

"For this I sincerely apologize," he said.
 In 2008, the Los Angeles Times revealed that the judge had maintained an email list of friends and acquaintances who share his brand of humor, that he used to distribute crude jokes, some of them sexually themed, and that he had a publicly accessible website that contained pornographic images.
 Anthony J. Scirica, then the Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, who some believe was murdered while on a hunting trip in Texas near the Mexican Border,  wrote at the time that Kozinski’s “conduct exhibiting poor judgment with respect to this material created a public controversy that can reasonably be seen as having resulted in embarrassment to the institution of the federal judiciary.”

Another federal judge last week said there are grounds to open an inquiry into allegations of judicial misconduct against Kozinski.

"Family and friends have urged me to stay on, at least long enough to defend myself. But I cannot be an effective judge and simultaneously fight this battle. Nor would such a battle be good for my beloved federal judiciary," he said.

Kozinski also said he is "proud" of the "success" of his clerks.

"It has also been my privilege to help train the best and the brightest of several generations of new attorneys. I was made better by working with them," he wrote. "My clerks went on to stellar careers in law, business and academics. Their success has made me proud and I am gratified by the outpouring of support I have received privately from so many of them."

 A former clerk for Judge Alex Kozinski said the powerful and well-known jurist, who for many years served as chief judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, called her into his office several times and pulled up pornography on his computer, asking if she thought it was photoshopped or if it aroused her sexually.
Heidi Bond, who clerked for Kozinski from 2006 to 2007, said the porn was not related to any case. One set of images she remembered was of college-age students at a party where “some people were inexplicably naked while everyone else was clothed.” Another was a sort of digital flip book that allowed users to mix and match heads, torsos and legs to create an image of a naked woman.
Bond is one of six women — all former clerks or more junior staffers known as externs in the 9th Circuit — who alleged  that Kozinski, now 67 and still serving as a judge on the court, subjected them to a range of inappropriate sexual conduct or comments. She is one of two former clerks who said Kozinski asked them to view porn in his chambers.
In a statement, Kozinski said: “I have been a judge for 35 years and during that time have had over 500 employees in my chambers. I treat all of my employees as family and work very closely with most of them. I would never intentionally do anything to offend anyone and it is regrettable that a handful have been offended by something I may have said or done.”
Kozinski provided the statement after The Post called and emailed a spokesman with a detailed list of the allegations this story would include. After the story posted online, the judge said, “I don’t remember ever showing pornographic material to my clerks” and, “If this is all they are able to dredge up after 35 years, I am not too worried.”
 When Bond was clerking, Kozinski was on the precipice of becoming chief judge for the 9th Circuit — the largest federal appeals court circuit in the country, handling cases for a large swath of the western United States as well as Hawaii and Alaska. The other people who alleged that Kozinski behaved inappropriately toward them worked in the 9th Circuit both before and after her, up to 2012.

Bond said she knew that she was to come to the judge’s office when her phone beeped twice. She said she tried to answer Kozinski’s inquiries as succinctly and matter-of-factly as possible. Bond was then in her early 30s and is now 41.
If the question was about photoshopping, Bond said, she would focus on minor details of the images. If Kozinski asked whether the images aroused her, Bond said, she would respond: “No, this kind of stuff doesn’t do anything for me. Is there anything else you need?” She said she recalled three instances when the judge showed her porn in his office.
“I was in a state of emotional shock, and what I really wanted to do was be as small as possible and make as few movements as possible and to say as little as possible to get out,” Bond said.
Bond, who went on to clerk for the Supreme Court and now works as a romance novelist writing under the name Courtney Milan, and another clerk, Emily Murphy, who worked for a different judge on the 9th Circuit and is now a law professor, described their experiences in on-the-record interviews. The other four women spoke on the condition that their names and some other identifying information not be published, out of fear that they might face retaliation from Kozinski or others.
Kozinski, who served as the chief judge on the 9th Circuit from 2007 to 2014, remains a prominent judge, well known in the legal community for his colorful written opinions. His clerks often win prestigious clerkships at the Supreme Court.
Murphy, who clerked for Judge Richard Paez, said Kozinski approached her when she was talking with a group of other clerks at a reception at a San Francisco hotel in September 2012. The group had been discussing training regimens, and Murphy said she commented that the gym in the 9th Circuit courthouse was nice because other people were seldom there.
Kozinski, according to Murphy and two others present at the time who spoke to The Post, said that if that were the case, she should work out naked. Those in the group tried to change the subject, Murphy and the others present said, but the judge kept steering the conversation toward the idea of Murphy exercising without clothes.
“It wasn’t just clear that he was imagining me naked, he was trying to invite other people — my professional colleagues — to do so as well,” Murphy said. “That was what was humiliating about it.”
Murphy, who was 30 at the time of the incident and is now 36, provided The Post with a 2012 email showing that she told a mentor about what had happened at the time. Two of Murphy’s friends who were present at the time of the encounter, speaking on the condition of anonymity, also confirmed her account.
Bond, similarly, provided emails showing that she told a friend what had happened at least as of 2008. The friend, fellow romance novelist Eve Ortega, provided the same emails. She confirmed that Bond had told her years ago that Kozinski made inappropriate sexual comments and showed her porn.
Kozinski has previously been embroiled in controversies related to sexually explicit material.
In 2008, the Los Angeles Times revealed that the judge had maintained an email list that he used to distribute crude jokes, some of them sexually themed, and that he had a publicly accessible website that contained pornographic images.
A judicial investigation ultimately found that Kozinski did not intend to allow the public to see the material and that, instead, the judge and his son were careless in protecting a private server from being accessible on the Internet.
Anthony J. Scirica, then the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, wrote at the time that Kozinski’s “conduct exhibiting poor judgment with respect to this material created a public controversy that can reasonably be seen as having resulted in embarrassment to the institution of the federal judiciary.”
According to Scirica’s report, Kozinski said that he used the server to keep a variety of items he received by email, including TV commercials, video clips, cartoons, games and song parodies.
Of the sexually explicit files, Kozinski testified: “Some I thought were odd or funny or bizarre, but mostly I don’t have a very good reason for holding onto them. I certainly did not send them to anyone else or ask anyone to send me similar files,” according to Scirica’s report.

Kozinski also testified that he “does not visit and has no interest in pornographic websites,” according to Scirica’s report. He separately apologized for any embarrassment he had caused in maintaining the email list and said he had stopped sending the jokes.
Bond said the images Kozinski showed her seemed to come from his private server, because he pulled them from a site containing the term “kozinski.com.”
The other Kozinski clerk who said the judge showed her porn declined to provide specifics out of fear that Kozinski would be able to identify her. Bond said the judge also showed her a chart he claimed he and his friends from college had made to list the women with whom they had had sexual relations.
Bond said that either Kozinski or his administrative assistant reached out to her around the time of the news reporting on his private server, asking whether she would be willing to defend his character. She wrote to Ortega about the inquiry in 2008, according to emails the women shared with The Post, and Ortega responded that it “sounds like a very bad idea to me.”
“I know he brought you into his office to show you porn, I know he made sexual innuendos to you. I know this because you told me so in DC, and you even used the words sexual harassment,” Ortega wrote. “You said you would warn off other women thinking of clerking for him. And if there’s a woman out there he harassed worse than you, do you really want to be pitted against her? Because that’s what it would be. I’m worried that this is what he’s asking you to do — to be the female, intelligent face of his defense and make whoever it is accusing him look like a stupid slut, and then he hopefully never has to actually address those allegations.”
Kozinski was born in Romania to Holocaust survivors in 1950, and the family fled the communist state when he was a boy. Decades ago, long before he was a federal judge, he appeared on the television show “The Dating Game,” planting a kiss on a surprised young woman who selected him for a date. He is married and has three sons.
Kozinski was appointed to the 9th Circuit by President Ronald Reagan in 1985. He is an atypical federal appeals court judge — authoring irreverent opinions and not shying, as many of his colleagues do, from media appearances.
He styled one opinion in 2012 not as a traditional concurrence or dissent, but instead as “disagreeing with everyone.” He famously wrote during a trademark dispute between the toy company Mattel and the record company that produced the 1997 song “Barbie Girl”: “The parties are advised to chill.”
In more recent years, Kozinski wrote that using lethal injections to impose the death penalty was “a misguided effort to mask the brutality of executions by making them look serene and beautiful — like something any one of us might experience in our final moments,” and he told the Los Angeles Times, “I personally think we should go to the guillotine, but shooting is probably the right way to go.”

A former Kozinski extern said the judge once made a comment about her hair and looked her body up and down “in a less-than-professional way.” That extern said Kozinski also once talked with her about a female judge stripping.
“I didn’t want to be alone with him,” the former extern said.
A different former extern said she, similarly, had at least two conversations “that had sexual overtones directed at me,” and she told friends about them at the time. One of the friends, also a former extern, confirmed that the woman had told her about the remarks — though both declined to detail them for fear of being identified.
One former 9th Circuit clerk said she was at a dinner in Seattle, seated next to Kozinski, when he “kind of picked the tablecloth up so that he could see the bottom half of me, my legs.” She said Kozinski remarked, “I wanted to see if you were wearing pants because it’s cold out.” The former clerk said she was wearing pants at the time. The incident, she said, occurred in late 2011 or early 2012.
“It made me uncomfortable, and it didn’t seem appropriate,” said the former clerk, who worked for a different judge.
All of the women The Post interviewed said they did not file formal complaints at the time. Bond said Kozinski had so vigorously stressed the idea of judicial confidentiality — that what is discussed in chambers cannot be revealed to the outside — that she questioned even years later whether she could share what had happened with a therapist, even though she had already talked with Ortega about it.
Bond said Kozinski worked his clerks so hard that “there was no thought that I could see him as anything other than in complete control,” and she feared that not leaving with a good recommendation from him might jeopardize her career.
“I did think about walking away and concluded I just didn’t know what I would do if I did,” Bond said.
The other former Kozinski clerk who said the judge asked her to watch porn in his chambers said she both feared what he might do and knew that a complaint was unlikely to strip him of his influence.
“I was afraid,” the former clerk said. “I mean, who would I tell? Who do you even tell? Who do you go to?”
Murphy said she discussed what had happened with the judge for whom she was clerking, and he was supportive of her filing a complaint. But because the complaint would first go to Kozinski himself, then be referred elsewhere, Murphy said she chose not to proceed. The judge, Paez, declined to comment for this report through a representative.
As a judge, Kozinski has addressed the topic of sexual harassment in important ways. In 1991, he joined an opinion that decided such cases should be judged from the perspective of the victims, using what was then called the “reasonable woman” standard. The opinion, written by then-Judge Robert R. Beezer, noted pointedly, “Conduct that many men consider unobjectionable may offend many women.”
Beezer died in 2012. Kozinski himself wrote about sexual harassment in 1992, commenting on how legal remedies could come with unforeseen consequences.
He wrote that men “must be aware of the boundaries of propriety and learn to stay well within them,” while women “must be vigilant of their rights, but must also have some forgiveness for human foibles: misplaced humor, misunderstanding, or just plain stupidity.”

He acknowledged, though, that the problem of harassment was a real one.
“But who knew, who understood, that it was quite so pervasive,” Kozinski wrote. “Apparently most women did, while most men did not. It was the best-kept secret of modern times.”

He Made Us All Victims and Accomplices

For 20 years, I’ve felt it was too early to speak up about Judge Alex Kozinski. Now I fear it’s too late.

By Dahlia Lithwick

The first time I met Alex Kozinski was in 1996. I was clerking for the chief judge of the 9^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and there was an orientation for new clerks in San Francisco. One of my co-clerks and I were introduced to the already legendary, lifetime-tenured young judge at a reception, and we talked for a while. I cannot recall what we talked about. I remember only feeling quite small and very dirty. Without my prompting, my former co-clerk described this interaction in an email to me this week. “He completely ignored me and appeared to be undressing you with his eyes,” he wrote. “I had never seen anyone ogle another person like that and still have not seen anything like it. Was so uncomfortable to watch, and I wasn’t even the subject of the stare.”

The first time I spoke to Judge Kozinski on the phone came weeks later, when I called his chambers late at night. Our judge had a sitting in the same city as Judge Kozinski, and I had made plans with one of Kozinski’s then-clerks, an old college friend, to meet late at night for a drink. When I called his chambers, Judge Kozinski himself answered the phone. I introduced myself and asked to speak to his clerk, explaining that we had plans to meet up. The judge asked where I was. I said I was in my hotel room. Then he said, “What are you wearing?”

I was taken aback, in part because nobody talked this way in real life. I surprised myself by reporting what Kozinski had said to my judge, who had always been kind and courtly and old-fashioned to the point of being almost saintly in my eyes. He looked horrified, as I am sure he was. But it was 1996. And the relationships between law clerks and their judges are mostly built on worshipful silence. There is no other work relationship left in America that is comparable. Which is, as it happens, part of the problem.

Those in his circle got dragged along into a world that diminishes and belittles women.

For the 20 intervening years, I have promised myself that if Judge Kozinski was ever to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee for a Supreme Court confirmation hearing, I would testify about the dozens of conversations I’d had over the years with other clerks and lawyers about Kozinski’s behavior, about the strange hypersexualized world of transgressive talk and action that embodied his chambers. It turns out, it didn’t take a confirmation hearing to kick off this conversation. On Dec. 8, the Washington Post published the stories of six women—two of them, Heidi Bond and Emily Murphy, brave enough to go on the record—alleging that Kozinski had harassed them when they clerked or otherwise worked for him, or when they clerked for another 9^th Circuit judge. Bond says Kozinski pulled up pornography on a computer in his chambers and asked if it aroused her. One accuser spoke of him looking “her body up and down ‘in a less-than-professional way.’ ” Another reported about his fixation on the idea that she should exercise naked.

In a statement to the Post, Kozinski said, “I have been a judge for 35 years and during that time have had over 500 employees in my chambers. I treat all of my employees as family and work very closely with most of them. I would never intentionally do anything to offend anyone and it is regrettable that a handful have been offended by something I may have said or done.” After the Post story was published, he additionally told the Los Angeles Times, “I don’t remember ever showing pornographic material to my clerks,” and “If this is all they are able to dredge up after 35 years, I am not too worried.” He also noted that Bond had written a romance novel that featured “very torrid sex.” Kozinski has not replied to Slate’s request for comment as of publication time.

I never reported to Judge Kozinski during my tenure at the 9^th Circuit, so my story is different. Nevertheless, I believe Bond and Murphy, because the pattern they describe is a familiar one. It is hard to put into words what felt off to me about Judge Kozinski’s behavior. To start, I would suggest you watch this infamous video from 1968 of the future judge delivering an egregious kiss to his prospective date on an episode of The Dating Game.

Nothing like that happened to me. But perhaps it helps you understand why, even though he never put his mouth directly on mine or clasped my throat, his consistent way of greeting me—with a kiss on the cheek that always lasted a few seconds too long, in front of colleagues I respected if not revered, so prolonged that others noted it—was unwanted.

And yet I still don’t quite know the word for it. In so many of his interactions with me, and conversations around me, Judge Kozinski has always gone one step over the line of appropriate sexual discourse. At the same time, he pushes a worldview that suggests there is no such thing as a line. Both personally and in his jurisprudence, I don’t think he believes that porn is porn, or that sex talk is problematic in the workplace. His acts of darting back and forth into deep sexual taboo became a natural experiment in who would live there with him. But because he is powerful, and because relationships with him are proximate to yet more power, those in his circle got dragged along into a world that diminishes and belittles women. For more evidence of this, you can read this diary entry he wrote for Slate in 1996, describing an outing with an unnamed clerk to attend a lingerie party.

Kozinski forced us all into this mess with him. And still, I am aware as I write this that I should have found my footing, that the women who came up after me, and who spoke up, are manifestly braver than I was. I am further aware that my failure to speak up over the course of my career is part of the reason why it was possible for the women who came after me to be treated as disrespectfully as they were.

I have seen Judge Kozinski dozens of times in the past two decades, moderated his panels, sat next to him at high-powered, high-status events and dinners. My husband will tell you he once fielded a call from the judge to my home, in which Kozinski described himself as my “paramour.” I have, on every single such occasion, been aware that part of his open flouting of empathy or care around gender was a show of juvenile, formulaic bad-assery designed to co-opt you into the bargain. We all ended up colluding to pretend that this was all funny or benign, and that, since everyone knew about it, it must be OK. It never was.

At a different reception in a different hotel in San Francisco this past summer, a friend was so shocked watching the judge greet me with yet another too-long, too-exuberant public kiss that he felt he had to check in with me later. I was mortified, as my texts that night reflected. The fact that I had simply acceded to this treatment, at age 50, with teenage children, took my breath away. I texted my husband and my two best friends. But this was our deal. I’d always agreed to it.

But now it’s 2017, and along with thinking about Heidi Bond, Emily Murphy, and those who came forward anonymously, I am also thinking about those who opted not to apply for clerkships with him, sidestepping an opportunity to get within close range of a coveted Supreme Court clerkship. Like others who have now come forward, I had told young female law students not to clerk for him.

I am thinking about the hundreds of plaintiffs in the discrimination and harassment suits he heard in the years he was on the bench. I am thinking of all the ways in which “open secrets” become their own spheres of truth, in which the idea that “everybody knew” something awful absolved all of us of the burden of doing anything. The former Kozinski and 9^th Circuit clerks I’ve spoken to in recent days feel heartsick, as I do, that for the sake of our own careers and professional legitimacy we continued to go to the dinners and moderate the panels, all the while hoping this story would break someday and we’d be off the hook. Some of these clerks are still encumbered by the norms that constrained Bond, norms that stipulate that clerks must not speak out against or question their judges, norms to which Kozinski insisted strict adherence—and norms that, it must be said, are insane on their face if they prevent reports of open sexual harassment.

Everybody knew. This is the problem with a system of “open secrets.” All the clerks and former clerks in Kozinski’s ambit knew and understood that you assumed the risk and accepted the responsibilities of secrecy. Once you acceded to the poker games and the movies and the ritualized sex talk, you helped give it cover and license. To sit at a table with Judge Kozinski was to suspend rules for how judges talk and behave. The swearing and the gleeful overt talk of sexuality wasn’t just part of the bargain of being around him. Our silence became tacit approval of that chambers’ gleeful rejection of the strictures of political correctness and of the social imperative to police oneself.

It keeps brilliant women from accessing power and dismisses others as hysterics—the “nutty and slutty” character assassination used to trash Anita Hill.

This story really shouldn’t be about me. I never worked for Kozinski, and even though his behavior affected me, my future never depended on him. But here is the part that does implicate me: When a prominent journalist with a national platform chooses—year after year—not to report on an open secret, or agrees to slouch through yet another dinner or panel or cocktail party, how can it only be about the victims and the harassers? Because really, if you can’t tell a man to back off when you’re 50 and at the peak of your journalistic power, who is ever going to do it? Back in the ’90s, it was too early to report what I knew, what we all knew. And now it is too late. As my friend Rebecca Traister has put it, “the stink got on me anyway. I was implicated. We all are, our professional contributions weighed on scales of fuckability and willingness to go along, to be good sports, to not be humorless scolds or office gorgons.”

I take no joy in this reporting. Kozinski is brilliant and wickedly talented. He has done important work on police and prosecutorial misconduct in particular, and if he is to be replaced, it will likely be with a 35-year-old Trump pick who diminishes women systemically, if not recreationally. Not a net win, if we are even trying to keep score for women anymore.

But if this moment is going to mean anything, it has to make room for the realization that every last one of us who gave cover to this type of systematic degradation and abuse of power is at the very least responsible for calling it out for what it was. We are also responsible for apologizing, and figuring out how we can start to do better. I have written extensively about the gendered pipeline to Supreme Court clerkships. Until now, I have failed to mention that the pipeline sometimes demanded the ritualized humiliation of young women.

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For years, I excused myself because I believed that the casual degradation of women that emanated from Judge Kozinski’s orbit was the death rattle of an old America: a symbol of the sad, broken longing for the world of Mad Men, a world that ended as soon as women reached parity with men in law school. Donald Trump and his foot soldiers are proof that this old America is very much alive, and that it’s in fact a full-scale project to treat women as trivial and ornamental and to hold them back. It keeps brilliant women from accessing power and dismisses other brilliant women as hysterics—the “nutty and slutty” character assassination used to trash Anita Hill. It’s disturbing to realize that, even today, the main markers I relied on to confirm Kozinski’s bad behavior were the shocked reactions of normal, good men: my husband, my friend, my co-clerk. Sure, I felt dirty after each interaction, but my feelings didn’t feel like enough.

I always figured I would feel better when Judge Kozinski’s #MeToo came home to roost. I don’t. His reactions to the accusers—belittling their allegations, shaming Bond for writing sex scenes in romance novels—were the reactions I was trying to avoid bringing down on myself when I failed to insist that Article III judges not talk to and about women this way, not at work, and not as we struggled to find purchase in the profession of our choosing. Somewhere along the way I managed to create a career for myself. In part, I did it by keeping secrets. I’d like to be done with that now.