Conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito denied a New York Times report Saturday where an anti-abortion pastor claimed that he knew the result of the landmark 2014 Hobby Lobby case before the court announced the decision after talking with friends who dined with Alito and his wife at the time.
According to The Times, the Rev. Rob Schenck told the publication that he learned of the 2014 case decision after speaking with a friend, and donor to his organization, Gayle Wright, who allegedly said that Alito told her and her husband during a private dinner that the company would prevail in its challenge to supplying contraception to employees as part of their health insurance program.
The court decided 5-4 that the Christian company's objection to providing contraception on religious grounds was correct, and that requiring them to provide that as part of an employee's healthcare plan violated their religious rights.
The Times report said that Schenck learned about the decision from speaking with Wright in a phone conversation following the dinner. He has come forward now after writing a letter about the 2014 incident in light of the leak regarding the court's Dobbs decision in June that overturned 1973's Roe v. Wade ruling making abortion legal.
The leak of that upcoming decision caused a backlash and protests at the homes of the conservative justices that continued until after the decision was announced.
Chief Justice John Roberts immediately ordered an investigation into the leak, and Alito called it a "grave betrayal" in October, CNN reported.
In a statement Saturday, published by both The Times and The Washington Post, Alito denied ever passing such information along to the Wrights, insisting that the referenced dinner was strictly a social event.
"The allegation that the Wrights were told the outcome of the decision in the Hobby Lobby case, or the authorship of the opinion of the court, by me or my wife is completely false," The Post reported Alito saying in his statement. "My wife and I became acquainted with the Wrights some years ago because of their strong support for the Supreme Court Historical Society; and since then, we have had a casual and purely social relationship. I never detected any effort on the part of the Wrights to obtain confidential information or to influence anything that I did in either an official or private capacity, and I would have strongly objected if they had done so."
Gayle Wright also denied to the Times that the 2014 decision was disclosed.
"Being a friend or having a friendly relationship with a justice, you know that they don't ever tell you about cases. They aren't allowed to," Wright told the Times "Nor would I ask. There has never been a time in all my years that a justice or a justice's spouse told me anything about a decision."
While Schenck was anti-abortion at the time of the 2014 ruling, The Times reported that he has since shifted his position on the issue and has more of a progressive view now, telling the news outlet that his prior position "was wrong."
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