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Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito denied the accusation of a former anti-abortion activist that Alito or his wife disclosed to conservative donors the outcome of a pending case of 2021 on contraceptives and rights religious.
The New York Times reported Saturday that Rob Schenck, who on his website identifies himself as “a right-wing religious leader but now a dissenting evangelical voice,” he said he was told the outcome of the case, Hobby Lobby v. Burwell, several weeks before it was announced. Schenck said a conservative donor to his organization relayed the information to him after a dinner with Alito, who wrote the majority opinion in the case, and the judge’s wife, Martha-Ann.
But the donor, Gayle Wright, told the Times and claimed in an interview Saturday that Schenck’s account was untrue and Alito also issued a statement denying it.
Alito was the author of the opinion in the case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, in which the Supreme Court ruled in favor of two for-profit corporations that religiously opposed a provision of the Affordable Care Act that requires employers to provide health insurance that includes contraceptive coverage.
In a statement circulated to various news outlets on Saturday, Alito said that “the allegation that my wife or I informed the Wrights the result of the decision in the Hobby Lobby case, or the authorship of the opinion of the Court, is completely false”.
The judge of the The Supreme Court said that it “never detected any effort on the part of the Wrights to obtain confidential information or to influence anything I did in an official or private capacity, and I would have strongly opposed it if they had.”
Alito said he would be “shocked and offended if those allegations are true.”
Schenck defends himself
In response to questions Saturday about the denials from Alito and Wright, Schenck confirmed in a statement “the extensive details and facts” he provided in his Times story and declined to comment further.
Schenck’s indictment comes after the unprecedented leak of Alito’s draft opinion defending a restrictive Mississippi abortion law and striking down the constitutional right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade almost 54 years before.
The leak was a shocking violation of the court’s closed and secret deliberations, and Alito recently denounced it as a “serious betrayal of trust.”