You are here: Home » Adult Webmaster News » 9th Circuit's Alex Kozinski Facing Porn-Based...
Select year   and month 
 
December 11, 2017

9th Circuit's Alex Kozinski Facing Porn-Based Misconduct Charges

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.—For the second time in his career, one of the federal judicial system’s most prominent judges faces accusations of sexual misconduct involving porn. In 2008, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Alex Kozinski was cleared of the accusations the stemmed from a private internet server containing sexually explicit images.  This time, Kozinski may have gone too far.  The judge, whose rulings suggest that his philosophy is that of a Republican with Libertarian leanings, was appointed to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan in 1982, and elevated by Reagan to the Ninth Circuit Court three years later. A report in The Washington Post published last week alleged that the 67-year-old Kozinski sexually harassed women who worked in his office by showing them porn on his work computer, pressuring them to comment on the images, and prodding them into other unwanted conversations of a sexual nature.  Two of the women, Heidi Bond and Emily Murphy, were former law clerks for Kozinski, who was Chief Judge of the San Francisco-based Ninth Circuit Appellate Court from 2007 to 2014. Both spoke on the record about Kozinski to The Post.  Four other women were lower-level staff members, known in the parlance of the court as “externs,” who told their stories anonymously. In 2008 Kozinski was forced to recuse himself from a high-profile obscenity case against “scat porn” producer Ira Isaacs when it was revealed by the Los Angeles Times that the judge kept a private computer server in his family’s home on which he stored pornographic material. Kozinski was ultimately exonerated of wrongdoing by a panel of judges from the U.S. Third Circuit Court, who ruled that though the material in one folder on the judge’s computer was “undoubtedly offensive to many,” his possession of the porn on a private computer had no effect on his ability to do his duty as a judge. The images on Kozinski’s computer included,  “a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows... a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal [and] ...a graphic step-by-step pictorial in which a woman is seen shaving her pubic hair.” The computer, the Third Circuit judges found, was not intended to be publicly accessible, though it inadvertently became public due to a poor security configuration on Kozinski’s server. During that 2008 investigation, Kozinski “testified that he does not visit and has no interest in pornographic websites,” according to the Third Circuit report.  But according to The Post report, Kozinski on several occasions summoned Bond into his judicial office "and pulled up pornography on his computer, asking if she thought it was Photoshopped or if it aroused her sexually." The Post article also reported that Kozinski initiated inappropriate conversations with the women, once approaching Murphy at a 2012 reception in a San Francisco hotel and offering the unsolicited suggestion, in front of a group of her co-workers, that Murphy should work out at the courthouse gym with no clothes on. When she and others tried to change the subject, the judge kept bringing up his nude workout idea again and again, Murphy said. “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 told The Post. “That was what was humiliating about it.” In addition, one of the unnamed “externs” alleged that Kozinski, while at dinner with the woman, lifted up the tablecloth and looked at her under the table, telling her, “I wanted to see if you were wearing pants.” Another of the women who spoke anonymously also alleged that Kozinski made her view porn, and that she was “afraid” of the judge as a result of the incident.  “I mean, who would I tell?” the woman told the paper. “Who do you even tell? Who do you go to?” Kozinski issued a statement last week in which, while not denying the accusations, appeared to brush them off, saying that in 35 years as a judge he has supervised more than 500 employees. and, "it is regrettable that a handful have been offended by something I may have said or done.”

 
home | register | log in | add URL | add premium URL | forums | news | advertising | contact | sitemap
copyright © 1998 - 2009 Adult Webmasters Association. All rights reserved.