According to an exclusive report from Rolling Stone, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s husband, Jesse Barrett, is now repping Fox Corporation in a $3 million defamation suit, raising questions about conflicts of interest and personal enrichment enjoyed by conservative Supreme Court justices.
As Rolling Stone points out, the case is notable because Fox Corporation—the parent company of Fox News— is directly paying the family of a Supreme Court justice, which neither Barrett nor her husband are required to disclose. Barrett’s husband is a managing partner at SouthBank Legal, which opened its D.C. office—led by Barrett—after his wife joined the Supreme Court. Jesse Barrett’s list of anonymized cases on the SouthBank Legal website now includes “represented a prominent media company in a lawsuit alleging defamation.” That addition joins an already lengthy list of white collar cases on his company profile, tucked between defending a Berkshire Hathaway company in an employment discrimination suit and defending an event promoter from fraud claims.
The defamation lawsuit Jessee Barrett has taken on alleges that Fox 32—a Chicago-area local station for Fox—ran a hit piece about Lavell Redmond who in 2021 was hired by the mayor of Dolton, Illinois, to work as a building code enforcement officer. The Fox report centers Redmond’s conviction for aggravated sexual assault of a minor, for which he pleaded guilty and served 24 years in prison, as the crux of the story while claiming Redmond was hired to enter “into Dolton homes and businesses to inspect them.” Redmond disputes this claim in his suit, according to Rolling Stone, noting that his work entailed inspecting building exteriors, not entering people’s homes.
The outlet later followed up on its reporting with news that Redmond had been arrested and may face new charges for violating the conditions of the sex offender registry—an accusation Redmond alleges is the direct result of Fox’s earlier misleading reporting on his job duties.
Barrett, representing Fox, filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, according to Rolling Stone. The motion to dismiss claims the suit was filed too late and that the corporation didn’t commit defamation because the “gist” of the reporting was “indisputably true” and characterized the central outrage of Redmond’s hiring—that a sex offender was entering people’s homes, which resulted in his arrest—as “immaterial details.”
While the relationship between conservative justices and rightwingers continuously raises ethical concerns, constitutional law professor Anthony Michael Kreis noted the odds of Fox Corporations case being kicked up to the conservative-held Supreme Court are slim given that Barrett would have to recuse herself from the case, winnowing the number of Fox News-brained justices on the court.
“You don’t hire the spouse of a Supreme Court justice to represent you in major litigation unless (1) you think they’re competent to do so and (2) you don’t foresee going to the Supreme Court where the spouse would have to recuse and you might really want/need their vote,” Kreis wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
Regardless, it’s entirely too convenient that the husband of a conservative Supreme Court justice is representing a conservative media company, and poses curious questions as to why Barrett, who is based in D.C., was tapped to represent the media company based in New York City for a lawsuit filed by a man in Illinois.
Source Agencies
