Newspaper Criticized for Report On Judge’s Web Site
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The wife of a federal judge alleged to have maintained a public Web site containing sexually explicit photos and videos is lashing out at the newspaper that first reported on the issue, the Los Angeles Times, for distorting the nature of the material and waiting to release the story until it would cause maximum disruption.
“The L.A. Times story, authored by Scott Glover, is riddled with half-truths, gross mischaracterizations and outright lies,” a California lawyer married to Judge Alex Kozinski of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, Marcy Tiffany, wrote in a letter posted yesterday on a Web log, Patterico.com.
The newspaper reported last week that the judge maintained a publicly accessible Web site with an “extensive” collection of sexually explicit material. The disclosure, which came as Judge Kozinski presided over opening arguments in the obscenity trial of a purveyor of scatological pornography, led the judge to declare a mistrial and call for an investigation into his own conduct.
In her e-mail message, Ms. Tiffany said the materials her husband collected were off-color jokes, and not a collection that betrayed an obsession with bestiality or even with sex. “The fact is, Alex is not into porn — he is into funny — and sometimes funny has a sexual character,” the judge’s wife said. She faulted the newspaper for using “graphic descriptions that make the material sound like hard-core porn when, in fact, it is more accurately described as raunchy humor.”
Ms. Tiffany noted that her husband did not have a Web site with a graphical interface, but rather a file server that was not secured. “What excuse is there for timing the story with surgical precision so as to do maximum damage to the judicial process?” she asked.
A spokeswoman for the Times, Nancy Sullivan, called the paper’s coverage “fair and accurate.”
“Once the matter became newsworthy, the judge was presented with the information we had and was given a full opportunity to respond,” she wrote in an e-mail message responding to a query from The New York Sun.
