Judge Accused of Porn-Linked Sex Harassment Quits Bench

Just days after United States Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts ordered an investigation into allegations of sexual harassment against Ninth Circuit Court Judge Alex Kozinski, the 67-year-old Kozinski who served on the federal appellate court for 32 years, announced his immediate retirement on Monday morning. Following a Washington Post exposé on Kozinski last month, in which six women who worked at the San Francisco-based Ninth Circuit accused Kozinski of sexual misconduct—including one who said that the judge pressured her into viewing and discussing porn that he pulled up on his office computer—nine more women came forward with similar stories. Read previous AVN.com coverage of the Kozinski sexual harassment scandal at this link and also at this link. Four women out of the 15 total said that Kozinski physically groped them, while the others cited his inappropriate and overtly sexualized comments and conversations  with them. Three of the women, all former law clerks at the Ninth Circuit, said that Kozinski without their permission, showed them porn or otherwise explicit images on his computer, including one clerk who said that the judge surprised her by displaying an “open-legged image of a male figure that was naked.”  She added that after she told Kozinski that she did not want to be shown such images, Kozinski never repeated the behavior with her, according to a second Post story, published on Friday. One now-retired federal judge, Christine Miller, said that Kozinski in 1986 first propositioned her to accompany him to a motel to have sex, and when she refused, he “grabbed each of my breasts and squeezed them.” In a statement issued Monday morning, Kozinski appeared to excuse his alleged sexual misconduct, describing it as resulting from his “broad sense of humor.” But he apologized in the statement for any actions that may have “caused any of my clerks to feel uncomfortable.” Kozinski said that his “family and friends” wanted to stay on the bench and fight the allegations against him, but he concluded that he realized he “cannot be an effective judge and simultaneously fight this battle. Nor would such a battle be good for my beloved federal judiciary. And so I am making the decision to retire, effective immediately.” The allegations are not the first against Kozinski, who in 2008 faced accusations that he ran a public porn site off of a home computer that he shared with his family, resulting in the suspension of the Ira Isaacs obscenity trial, over which the judge was presiding. But Kozinski was cleared of any wrongdoing in that case. On Monday, the online publication Sam Sankar—a former law clerk for a different Ninth Circuit judge, writing in the online magazine Slate—recounted a 2001 Kozinski decision which overturned a sexual harassment jury verdict saying that the female plaintiff, a hearing-impaired postal service employee,  failed to tell the supervisor who had harassed her that “his attention was unwelcome.”