For all their efforts, both the Eleventh Circuit and Judicial Conference left a lot of clues.
As soon as we flagged an unnamed federal judge having sex in chambers as part of an extramarital affair with a “high ranking law enforcement officer,” everyone asked the immediate follow-up, “how is a federal judge unable to afford a hotel room?” Followed soon after by, “who is the anonymous judge?” Because despite the severity of the allegations — an affair that raised serious blackmail risks, attending openly partisan events, and lying to investigators when caught — the Eleventh Circuit and the Judicial Conference both concealed the judge’s identity. They even adjusted the very minor sanction to allow the judge “to word the letters of apology vaguely so as to ensure that a letter could not be ‘used against [the Subject Judge] in some way.’”
Within 45 minutes of publishing our article, we worked out with a very high degree of confidence that it was Judge Eleanor Ross of the Northern District of Georgia. That said, we didn’t have a source with first-hand knowledge to confirm the story. While we made coy allusions, we were not prepared to publish this without more.
Bloomberg Law News has just confirmed with a source directly familiar with the investigation that it is Judge Ross.
The Eleventh Circuit thought it had been so clever in anonymizing its report. The reports don’t include a name or a district, and refer only to “Subject Judge” throughout. The reports even assiduously avoid identifying the judge by gender, proving that even conservative judges can figure out how pronouns work with minimal effort. And yet the reports failed to obscure a number of details that made working out the judge’s identity possible. This is where the story is going to pivot and we’re going to talk about AI and how the federal courts are not ready for it.
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