Kerry Johnson

speaker

362 appearances 40 recordings 4 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard 7 Jun

Kerry Johnson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 36 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 8.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The NPR Politics Podcast · NPR Investigation: Harassment In The Federal Court System · 1 Mar 2025 podcast

Things like that happened quite a few times, she says.

Judge Jose Antonio Fuste copied down a love poem and left it at her desk. S says she struggled with her options, including whether to leave the job early. Eventually, a new law clerk arrived, and the judge made advances to her, too.

Together, she and the other clerk developed some strategies for handling the judge, their boss.

S says she and her fellow clerk, diligent young attorneys just out of law school, dug into legal research about sexual harassment and the ramifications of making a complaint about a federal judge. Ultimately, they've reached out to administrators in the appeals court for the First Circuit.

NPR could not independently confirm if the complaint reached the chief justice or what happened after that. Still, the judge remained on the bench for years. Until 2016, when he resigned after another clerk reported him to administrators. Judge Fustay did not respond to NPR's attempts to reach him for comment.

All these years later, the news of his retirement reached S., who's still afraid of the damage it could cause her career if she identifies herself by name. She was afraid to record with me using her own voice, so we found someone else to speak her words on tape verbatim.

Retirement stops any court investigation in its tracks. Often, a judge under scrutiny will keep their benefits and sometimes still show up at the courthouse. That's how things went down in the most notorious case in recent years.

Sexual misconduct allegations against Judge Alex Kaczynski rocked the federal courts in 2017. That followed a wave of MeToo complaints in Hollywood, the business world, media, and politics. Kaczynski apologized to his former clerks for making them feel uncomfortable. He said he had a, quote, broad sense of humor. But seven years after that scandal, Kaczynski's still working in the law.

He's even filed court papers for clients with cases before the Ninth Circuit, the same one he left amid a national outcry. The administrative office of the courts points out that Judges Kaczynski, Fustay, and Kindred are off the bench. It says the courts continue to make improvements to foster an exemplary workplace.

For most people, the courts are where accountability does happen when they have problems at work. But for the people who work in those very courts, their rights are not clear. Protections for them are not set out under law, and judges' colleagues and friends can be the deciders. there are efforts to change that. Congresswoman Norma Torres, a Democrat from California, is leading the charge.

Last fall, she convened a group of experts on the Hill to try to draw attention to the problem.

Torres says the majority of judges behave properly, but the ones who don't face little accountability.

Torres says the courts operate in a patchwork, so no one's in charge of overseeing all the systems that employees use to report misconduct. Torres had Congress set aside money for two research studies to understand the holes in the system. Greta Goodwin led one of those efforts for the Government Accountability Office.

The federal courts say the study validates the steps they've already taken to improve conditions for workers there. But Torres says that's not enough. She's committed to using the power of the purse, the appropriations power, to try to get the judiciary to do more. She's working alongside Georgia Congressman Hank Johnson. Good morning. Pleasure to see you, sir.

Johnson's walking us through the Rayburn House office building and into the Capitol to introduce the Judiciary Accountability Act. His bill would make clear the same legal protections for workers in the private sector and the executive branch also apply to the 30,000 people who work for the federal courts.

The legislation did not get a hearing before Congress left town last year, and Republicans now control both chambers of Congress. Reforms to the judicial branch are not a priority for them. From the Supreme Court on down, the judiciary has been resisting oversight, and so far, the judges are getting their way.

The people who work for federal judges, for probation departments, for public defenders, they can't go to the executive branch for help. and it's not clear they can sue in courts either.

In fact, many former clerks told me it's hard to even find a lawyer to give any advice because these complaint systems are so hard to understand and because the lawyers worry about getting on the bad side of a federal judge who may decide their own cases someday. Aliza Schatzman.

The federal courts say they've done a lot to make sure workers are treated with dignity and respect. Court administrators say employees now have several ways to report problems. And when it comes to abusive or hostile behavior, they have more power to complain about their bosses than people who work outside.

But I've been told clerks who run into trouble on the job still face tremendous pressure to remain silent. A bad word from a judge can derail a clerk's career, while judges serve for life. I heard it again and again. Those judges who behave badly, often it's an open secret inside the courthouse. But nobody does anything about it.

Showing 321–340 of 362 · page 17 of 19