This story includes descriptions of sexual abuse.
In 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic began its rampage, a recent law school graduate started a new job in Alaska.
She hoped the coveted post 鈥� as law clerk to a federal judge 鈥� would jump-start her career. Instead, it was almost derailed by harassment and abuse.
"The judge was the HR department, the judge was my boss, the judge was a colleague," she said. "The judge was everything, he had all the power."
The power imbalance between judges with lifetime tenure and the young law clerks who work alongside them is both vast and unique to the judiciary. People in the federal court system don't have the same kind of job protections enshrined in law that most other Americans do.
The courts largely police themselves. That's because judicial independence 鈥� and protecting the balance of power 鈥� give judges a tremendous amount of sway over their own workplace rules. At the same time, federal judges have emerged in recent weeks as the lone check on employment abuses elsewhere in the federal government.
A nearly year-long NPR investigation has found problems with the courts' internal system 鈥� and a pervasive culture of fear about blowing the whistle. Forty-two current and former federal judicial employees spoke to NPR about their experience working for judges appointed by presidents from both major political parties.
One of them is the former clerk in Alaska. She's not being named because she alleges she's the survivor of sexual assault.
Early in her clerkship, the judge started testing her boundaries, with inappropriate conversations about his personal relationships. She thought it was part of her job to listen and help with anything in his life, she said.
"He had told me that I was a confidante and he had given me the title of career clerk and, you know, he had spoken to me about what an honor that was and鈥� I mean this is ridiculous, but I thought I was doing a public service," she said.
As the judge's marriage came apart, , to the point where her phone felt like an "electric leash." In one message, he said she looked like a "f* Disney princess." In another, he told her he liked her blue pants.
Things got worse by the summer of 2022, so she found a new job, as a federal prosecutor in Alaska.
About a week after she left the judge's chambers, she ran into him at a party. He tried to get her to sit next to him on the couch there. Eventually she left, but she got a text from him saying he needed to talk to her.
It was cold that night, so the judge suggested they chat inside his apartment. Then, he insisted she come to the bedroom. At first, she sat on the corner of the bed, but he wanted her to lay down. Then, she told investigators, he grabbed her breast. She tried to pull his arm off, she says, but he was really strong.
"I just remember thinking like there's nothing I can do about this," she told the investigators. "This is about to happen." The judge later told investigators it was consensual.
He took off her pants and performed oral sex on her.
'No Legal Recourse'
A judge's control over the future of a young lawyer in his or her chambers is real鈥攁nd lasting. With only a phone call, a judge can open doors to a lucrative job at a law firm or shut them permanently.
Unlike people who work for private companies, nonprofit groups or Congress, the 30,000 employees of the federal courts usually .
"The federal judiciary is outrageously exempt from Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964," said Aliza Shatzman, who launched The Legal Accountability Project to offer clerks a way to share feedback about their experiences on the job. "That means that if you are a law clerk and you are sexually harassed, fired, retaliated against by a federal judge, you have no legal recourse."
Since 2017, when the federal courts say they've done a lot to make sure workers are treated with dignity and respect.
"We believe that the changes put in place over the past seven years have had a positive impact on the Judiciary workplace, a belief that was validated by two independent studies," a spokesperson for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts told NPR in a written statement. "We continue to make improvements as part of our efforts to foster an exemplary workplace for our employees."
Court administrators said employees now have several ways to report problems. And, when it comes to abusive or hostile behavior, they said federal judiciary workers have more leeway to complain about their bosses than people who work outside.
But the clerk in Alaska never used the judiciary's internal system to report the judge. She didn't know it existed.
And that's not uncommon. and the National Academy of Public Administration found many federal courts failed to put required information on reporting misconduct on their websites. About one in 10 court websites have no information about workplace conduct.
A person who once served as a resource for court employees seeking advice or information about filing complaints told NPR there are a lot of people trying to do the right thing. This person spoke anonymously, afraid of reprisal for talking about the system. They said it was a struggle just to get information updated on the court's website, so clerks could find out whom they can talk to, if they had the courage to speak.
A widespread culture of fear surrounds talking about what happens in a judge's chambers, from cases and decision-making to abuse and misconduct. And there's a good reason for that.
James Baker is a former judge who also worked in the White House and the military.
"The location where I found the power differential the most distinct was when I was serving as a judge with law clerks, and I think that's something worth noting," said Baker, who worked on last year's NAPA judiciary study.
Not only is the relationship between judges and clerks fraught, it often comes with a huge age gap; the average age of a federal judge is in the mid to late 60s, while law clerks tend to be in their mid to late 20s.
Here's the way the system works now.
If a clerk has a problem, their first option is something called informal advice.
"Informal advice could be anything like, you know, talk to the judge, write down your thoughts," said Gabe Roth, who pushes the courts to be more accountable through his group, Fix the Court. "It can be a lot of different sort of basic HR things that we've all spoken to HR people about."
The next step, called an assisted resolution, is a little more serious. The courts say there are about 500 people across the system who are designated to hear about problems and offer advice. Much happens informally through mediation, where a clerk or other court employee can raise concerns and get an apology or even a job transfer.
Then, there's the most serious option: making a formal complaint. Staying anonymous is not guaranteed. That's a big problem for many of the clerks and law students who reach out to Aliza Shatzman. She operates a database where clerks can share honest feedback about judges: the good and the bad.
"I don't take it lightly when I say the federal judiciary is the most dangerous white-collar workplace in America," Shatzman said.
Hard data about misconduct in the court system isn't easy to come by. For example, no one tracks the most commonly used way that clerks and other workers raise an alarm, that option to seek informal advice.
"There's tons of stats; you want to know the birth year of some random judge in Missouri from 1897," said Roth, of Fix the Court. "They have that. But the idea that they 鈥� have not successfully captured the most common type of complaint is very frustrating."
The courts unveiled their last November. That report showed more court employees are using the dispute resolution process. But few of them are law clerks.
There are more than 1,400 federal judges with life tenure 鈥� and they each have at least two clerks. Just seven complaints came from law clerks between 2021 and 2023.
"The actual number of complaints that flow out of chambers misconduct is a very small number," Judge Robert Conrad of the Administrative Office told reporters last year. "Wherever misconduct occurs in the judiciary, we need to be ready to address it in a serious way. But the notion that this is primarily a judge problem seems to be dispelled by the findings of the report."
Shatzman, of the Legal Accountability Project, interprets those numbers very differently.
"When you see a low number of harassment and misconduct complaints in a workplace, typically that does not signal that it is a safe workplace," she said. "Typically, it signals that the reporting mechanisms are broken and law clerks do not feel comfortable filing complaints."
Sexual Harassment, Bullying, and Discrimination
Over nearly a year, NPR heard the stories of people whose self-confidence was shattered by judges who screamed so loudly others could hear from the hallways, and people who were fired after only a few weeks on the job, for no clear reason.
Some described sexual harassment, like in the case of the Alaska clerk. Many more shared episodes of bullying. Others said they faced discrimination or harsh treatment because they had a disability or were pregnant.
Jessica Horton is one of them.
When she graduated from law school, at age 24, she felt lucky to get a job as a law clerk to a new federal judge.
Horton said she disclosed her pregnancy a couple of months before she started work. And at the time it didn't seem like it would be much of a problem for the judge who was herself a mom.
"She told me that she took off two weeks when she had each of her children," Horton said. "And so she said, 'You can expect the same.' And at the time, I had no context for how little that is."
Inside those chambers, the judge's word is law. And Horton fell in line.
She worried so much about missing work that she told the doctor she wanted to avoid a C-section, because of the recovery time. She refused an epidural too, because she had read about complications with them.
"My judge at one point asked me how dilated I was," Horton recalled. "And so she's like, well, maybe when you go to your appointment, the doctor should check. I had no idea. Like, I mean, at the time, like I knew that that was wrong. Looking back, that is so incredibly inappropriate."
Horton ended up back at a work event 11 days after her first child was born, still bleeding from birth, leaking milk, and completely miserable. She fought infections and bullying from another clerk.
The clerkship lasted a year 鈥� and to leave would be "career suicide," she said. She started counting down the days on the calendar.
Starting out, Horton had been excited about learning from the judge, having a mentor, maybe someday even becoming a judge herself.
"But after this experience, I changed my mind and it, I think, kind of put the nail in the coffin of my legal career pretty early," she said.
Her son is now 9 years old. Sometimes they drive by the courthouse and she reminds him, that's where he slept underneath her desk as a baby.
Horton decided to talk on the record, in part because she's left the legal profession.
Things can get pretty tough for clerks who speak out.
When the Alaska clerk reported the assault, she told a colleague in the U.S. attorney's office who had been assigned to mentor her.
"When I reported to my mentor, she was also the person that had been sending him nude photos and immediately told him that I reported the sexual assault," the clerk said.
The mentor later said in court papers that she also felt pressured to share nude pictures with the judge, given his power and authority, and because he told her he would have sway over a job she wanted.
The former clerk heard from friends that the judge was furious she'd told anyone. When she ran into him, in the hallway at the courthouse, she said he warned her to keep her head down and shut up. (The judge denied that.)
"The actual sexual assault was awful鈥ompletely awful and you know I've since sought therapy for that, and help. But what happened next was almost worse," she said.
The court system ultimately launched an investigation into the judge, Joshua Kindred. What followed were multiple rounds of interviews with investigators who cross-examined her and stress-tested her credibility. The court investigation took more than a year, and all the while two other young women clerks in the judge's chambers continued to work by his side.
At first, Kindred told investigators nothing sexual had happened between them. Much later, he said the experience was consensual and that he had no "sinister intent."
Last July, a special committee for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit . But the court committee found the judge did not retaliate against the former clerk and did not reach a conclusion about whether the judge sexually assaulted her.
Kindred resigned shortly before the report about his misconduct became public.
He did not respond to phone calls or messages to an email address and a phone number associated with him, or to messages sent to relatives.
A Patchwork Reporting System
Before the courts started to develop more formal systems for reporting abuse seven years ago, clerks sometimes had to figure out a solution for themselves 鈥� something that continues to this day.
That's what happened with a woman we're calling S, who worked for Judge Jos茅 Antonio Fust茅 in Puerto Rico, just out of law school.
"We were working together on a very high-profile, high-stakes death penalty case," she said. "I remember that I was in his chambers and we were sitting next to each other. And I remember that he put his hand on my thigh and I remember moving it off of my thigh and just being shocked."
Things like that happened quite a few times, she said, including an incident when the judge returned from a trip and tried to kiss her on the lips. He also copied down a love poem and left it at her desk, she said.
S said she struggled with her options, including whether to leave the job early. Eventually, a new law clerk arrived, and S said the judge made advances on her too.
"This wasn't about me personally. This was just a pattern and practice of behavior," S said.
Together she and the other clerk developed some strategies for handling the judge, their boss. They never went into his chambers on their own, for starters.
"Kind of just tried to stay away from him as much as we could, which is a very unfortunate situation, because part of the reason one might choose to work for a federal judge is because you want to be able to interact with a federal judge," she said. "So we just鈥ot very cold to him and I guess strength in numbers is how it turned out."
S said she and her fellow clerk 鈥� diligent young attorneys just out of law school 鈥� dug into legal research about sexual harassment and the ramifications of making a complaint about a federal judge.
Ultimately, they reached out to administrators in the Appeals Court for the First Circuit but S said they were told "there wasn't anything that could be done."
Fust茅 remained on the bench for years, until 2016, after another clerk reported him to administrators.
NPR attempted to reach Judge Fust茅 for comment, but he did not respond to phone calls or messages to an email address and a phone number associated with him, or to messages sent to relatives.
S knows Fust茅 has retired. But she's still afraid of the damage it could cause her career if she identifies herself by name.
"He was able to retire with all of his federal benefits," she said. "So I thought, 'Well, this doesn't really seem fair that all he has to do is kind of, you know, walk away and 鈥e could have been ready to retire in any case.'"
Retirement stops any court investigation in its tracks. Often a judge under scrutiny will keep their benefits and sometimes still show up at the courthouse.
That's how things went down in the most notorious case in recent years.
Sexual misconduct allegations against , after #MeToo complaints hit Hollywood, the business world, media and politics.
Kozinski apologized to his former clerks for making them feel uncomfortable. He said he had a "broad sense of humor."
But even after he retired, Kozinski kept working in the law. He's even filed court papers for clients with cases before the 9th Circuit, the same one he left amid a national outcry.
The Administrative Office of the Courts pointed out in a statement to NPR that three judges named in this story 鈥� Kozinski, Fust茅 and Kindred 鈥� are off the bench, and that two of them left before the #MeToo scandals erupted, and before the courts created a better reporting system.
A Push for Accountability聽
For most people, the courts are where they turn for accountability when they have problems at work. But for the people who work in those very courts, their rights are not that clear. Protections for them are not set out under law, and a judge's colleagues and friends can be the deciders.
Congresswoman Norma Torres, a Democrat from California,.
Last fall, she convened a group of experts on Capitol Hill to draw attention to the problem.
"I don't need to be a lawyer to know that people in power with no oversight get to sweep people and problems under the rug," she said.
Torres says the majority of judges behave properly, but the ones who don't face little accountability. The courts operate in a patchwork, so no one is in charge of overseeing all the systems that employees use to report misconduct. Torres pushed for Congress to set aside money for two research studies to understand the holes in the system.
Gretta Goodwin led one of those efforts, for the Government Accountability Office. But Goodwin found she didn't have the access to properly do her job.
"This report is about workplace misconduct," Goodwin said at the congressional roundtable. "And we were not really allowed to talk to employees or get perspectives from employees. We were allowed to speak to one current and one former employee."
The federal courts said they've already taken to improve conditions for workers there.
But Torres said that's not good enough. She's committed to using the power of the purse 鈥� the appropriations power 鈥� to try to get the judiciary to do more.
She and Georgia Democrat Hank Johnson also introduced the . The bill would make clear that the civil rights laws 鈥� the protections against discrimination on the basis of race, gender, disability and other protected characteristics, as well as against sexual harassment and retaliation 鈥� apply to the 30,000 people who work for the federal courts.
"This is just one small step, but a very important step to bring about some accountability," Johnson said.
Senator Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, helped sponsor a companion bill in the Senate. But neither piece of legislation got a hearing before Congress left town last year. Republicans now control both chambers of Congress and reforms to the judicial branch are not expected to be a priority for them this year.
As for other avenues of accountability, the people who work for federal judges, probation departments and public defenders can't go to the executive branch for help. And it's not clear they can sue in the courts either.
In fact, NPR heard from a dozen current and former employees that it's hard to even find a lawyer to give advice because these systems are so hard to understand, and because the lawyers worry about getting on the bad side of a federal judge who may decide their own cases someday.
Pressure to Remain Silent
Executives in the federal court system said they're committed to improving the work environment and they've taken concrete steps to demonstrate that.
"This is not the systemic failure that some critics stuck in a six-year time warp have used to describe the judiciary's efforts," Conrad, of the Administrative Office of the Courts, said last year.
But clerks told NPR that people who run into trouble on the job still face tremendous pressure to remain silent. A negative reference from a judge can detonate a clerk's career, while judges serve for life.
Judges who behave badly can be an open secret in a courthouse: NPR heard over and over again that the court security officers know, the longtime clerks know, their colleagues know. But a new batch of clerks, just out of law school, may not have heard those whispers.
"I can handle a tough boss," said a former clerk who spoke anonymously for fear of reprisal. "I can't handle an abusive boss. I just wish more people would talk about it."
Were you harassed or bullied by a federal judge or do you know someone who was? We want to hear about your experience. Your name will not be used without your consent, and you can remain anonymous. Please contact NPR by .
Barrie Hardymon, Monika Evstatieva and Krishnadev Calamur edited this story with help from Anna Yukhananov and Robert Little. Research from Barbara Van Woerkom, with art direction and photo editing by Emily Bogle. Production support from Casey Morell and Margaret Luthar.
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