SEXUAL PREDATOR JUDGE STEPHEN REINHARDT REMINDS US LAWYER-JUDGES ARE A PROTECTED CRIMINAL CLASS

"Most Liberal Judge" Accused of Sexual Harassment

February 13, 2020 

Daniel Greenfield

This story will get a lot less attention than allegation about Justice Kavanaugh based on a high school yearbook. Not just because Judge Reinhardt is dead. But because he was a lefty hero.

Here's a typically gushing Politico piece.

Judge Stephen Reinhardt, 87, reigned for 38 years as the liberal lion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, the nation’s largest appellate court with jurisdiction over nine states. Nothing, it seemed, could kill him. Not triple bypass surgery in 1982, not quadruple bypass surgery in 2001. Not the execution—over his fierce objection—of individuals he believed had been wrongfully convicted, nor the Supreme Court’s numerous other reversals of his most famous decisions—decisions upholding the right to die, striking down the requirement that students recite the Pledge of Allegiance, declaring unconstitutional a law prohibiting late-term abortions. Not the slow loss of his beloved wife, Ramona Ripston, to dementia, and the stress, sadness and loneliness that came with it. Not even the election of President Donald Trump, whose rhetoric and policies targeted the very people—immigrants, the criminally accused, the powerless—whose rights the judge had done everything he could to protect.

An all-star team of speakers—former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Yale Law School Dean Heather Gerken, among others—described with reverence Reinhardt’s legal acumen and work ethic

Now we're getting an insight into that work ethic.

Warren, now a staff attorney with the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, testified on Thursday that on her first day as a clerk for Reinhardt, she encountered a sine chart with “two round dots to the top of the curves such that the chart resembled a woman’s breasts.” She said Reinhardt had added the dots.

“In addition to emphasizing how proud he was of the nipples he had drawn on the chart and confirming that he and the clerk had made it, he asked me a question about whether or not it was ‘accurate,’” the testimony reads. “Based on his tone and demeanor, I understood his question to be asking whether or not the drawing looked like my breasts.”

And she alleged that the judge “routinely and frequently made disparaging statements about my physical appearance, my views about feminism and women’s rights, and my relationship with my husband (including our sexual relationship).”

“Often, these remarks included expressing surprise that I even had a husband because I was not a woman who any man would be attracted to. In that vein, Judge Reinhardt often speculated that my husband must be a ‘wimp,’ or possibly gay,” Warren testified. “Judge Reinhardt would use both words and gestures to suggest that my ‘wimp’ husband must either lack a penis, or not be able to get an erection in my presence.”

Warren also testified Thursday that Reinhardt’s comments reached a new level as the “Me Too” movement gained momentum in late 2017.

“He frequently discussed and always cast doubt upon credible allegations of sexual  harassment. The doubts he expressed were sometimes based on his assessment of the attractiveness of the accuser, and sometimes based on his general incredulity that men could be harassing women,” Warren testified. “For example, Judge Reinhardt told me that the allegations of sexual harassment that came out against people like Louis CK and Harvey Weinstein were made by women who had initially ‘wanted it,’ and then changed their minds.”

That, hilariously, was coming from a prog hero. Who, despite otherwise total fidelity to leftist causes, held feminism in contempt.

Did Reinhardt share this view with others? I'm going to guess that he did and that it was kept under wraps. Just as so many other potential scandals are.

And I'm also going to guess that whereas the Left insists on making its manufactured allegations of sexual harassment against Justice Thomas or Justice Kavanaugh into permanent asterisks underneath their names, this will be quickly whitewashed.