When it comes to harassment, are federal judges above the law?
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In 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic began to shut things down, a recent law school graduate started a new job all the way across the country in Alaska. She accepted a coveted post as law clerk for a federal judge.
It's kind of like a unicorn. It's a position that follows you for the rest of your life. It's on the top of your resume. You know, people pay attention to it, especially a federal court clerkship.
The clerk hoped this job would jumpstart her career. She didn't know anyone else there, only the judge.
The judge was the HR department. The judge was my boss. The judge was a colleague. The judge was everything. He had all the power.
He started testing her boundaries early on.
It started immediately, the inappropriate conversations. There was a lot of talk, you know, about the judge's personal relationships, about sexual relationships.
She says she thought it was part of her job to listen to the judge and help him with anything. He was going through a divorce and he began to text her constantly to the point where her phone felt like an electric leash.
You know, I never had respite from being just a few text messages away from him. It was constant. It was during work. It was after work. It was all the time.
That pressure built. In the summer of 2022, things got worse.
That's when he told me he'd been communicating with this prosecutor that was appearing before him. And she had been sending nude photos. And that was the breaking point for me where I decided I needed to leave.
She stayed in Alaska, but she got a new job as a federal prosecutor. And this, she hoped, would put an end to the ordeal. As it turned out, that was wrong. Consider this. People who work for the federal court system don't have the same kinds of job protections that most other Americans do. A nearly year-long NPR investigation has found problems with the way the courts police sexual harassment and bullying and a pervasive culture of fear about blowing the whistle. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Consider This from NPR. The voice of the Alaska law clerk you heard before the break was not her real voice, although those are her words, verbatim. We used a voice actor because she was too afraid to talk. I'll turn it over to NPR's justice correspondent, Carrie Johnson, to help you understand why. And a warning, this piece contains a description of sexual assault.
About a week after she left the judge's chamber, she ran into him at a party. I'm going to tell the next part of the story entirely from allegations in the court papers. That's in part because retelling it to me was too painful. At the party, he tried to get her to sit next to him on the couch. Eventually she left, but she got a text from him saying he needed to talk to her. It was cold that night, so the judge suggested they chat inside his apartment. Once inside, the judge insisted she come to the bedroom. At first she sat on the corner of the bed, but he wanted her to lay down. Then, she told investigators, he grabbed her breast. She tried to pull his arm off, but he was really strong. I just remember thinking, like there's nothing I can do about this, she told the investigators. This is about to happen. Like I always felt like this thing he could not touch. And finally, he felt like he could touch. A judge's control over the future of a young lawyer is real and lasting. With only a phone call, a judge can open doors to a lucrative job at a law firm or shut them permanently.
And there's no one really policing what happens inside a judge's chambers beside the judge themselves. Judicial independence and protecting the balance of power give judges a tremendous amount of sway over workplace rules. For nearly a year, I interviewed 42 people, current and former workers within the federal court system, about their experience. They're men and women who work for more than two dozen judges, appointed by presidents from both major political parties. I heard from people whose self-confidence was shattered by judges who screamed so loudly others could hear from the hallways. People who were fired after a week or two on the job for no clear reason. Some describe sexual harassment like in the case of the Alaska clerk.
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