The journalist who secretly recorded Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and his wife, Martha-Ann, making candid comments at a function earlier this month explained on Monday how easy it was to do so, and described the jurist’s increased “grievance” over his comments to her last year.
Lauren Windsor, who is also a documentary filmmaker, appeared on MSNBC’s The ReidOut where she told anchor Joy Reid how she attended the Supreme Court Historical Society’s annual dinner last Monday.
She earlier told Rolling Stone that she approached Alito “as though she were a religious conservative,” but added to The ReidOut, “I was a due-paying member. I bought a ticket,” she said succinctly.
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Windsor then contrasted Alito’s comments at last year’s function—which she had also recorded—with his remarks from last week, saying she felt that in the latter instance, he came off as more aggrieved.
“When the first interaction happened, I was like, OK, well, it’s very hard to get a judge, a justice, even lower-level judges to talk about politics—anything that might imply politics—to give any sort of hint or signal as to what their own opinions may be,” she said. “And so after that first interaction, I didn’t publish it because it wasn’t very newsworthy.”
Alito had said then that he blames “the media” for polarization in the country and distrust of the Supreme Court “because they do nothing but criticize us.”
Windsor continued: “But I felt like in the course of the last year—because that was before the spotlight was on him with ProPublica—so I felt like that grievance was more peaked over the past year, with his own experience. And so, I wanted to see if he had a different reaction.”
Windsor was alluding to an investigative report detailing Alito’s luxury fishing trip with a GOP billionaire who later had cases before the Supreme Court. Alito failed to report the trip, despite its significance. Alito also wrote a pre-buttal to the story in The Wall Street Journal, in effect drawing more attention to it.
The controversy over Jan. 6-linked flags at two of Alito’s homes has put him further under the microscope. He responded by placing responsibility for the flags on his wife and refusing to recuse himself from any cases related to Jan. 6 or Donald Trump.
As for Martha-Ann Alito, Windsor described her “aggression” when discussing how she would like to “get even,” for instance by creating her own flag.
“Throughout these sort of rants, there was a lot of, you know, just aggression… against the media, getting even. It felt like another instance of getting even [was] ‘Shame, shame,’” she said, referencing Alito’s imaginary flag with that word written in Italian.
“And at one point she talked about being German, and I really had more of the impression that she was Italian, by the way that she was talking about it.”
In her comments to Windsor, Alito explained her desire to “get even.”
“I’m German, from Germany. My heritage is German,” she said. “You come after me, I’m going to give it back to you.”
