Judge faces suspension after asking woman if she closed her legs to stop sexual assault

A New Jersey judge who asked a woman if she had closed her legs to try to prevent an alleged sexual assault should be suspended without pay for three months, a state committee has recommended.

>>Mihir ZaveriThe New York Times
Published : 6 April 2019, 07:53 PM
Updated : 6 April 2019, 07:54 PM

The recommendation in March was based on the committee’s finding that Ocean County Superior Court Judge John Russo violated the code of judicial conduct on four occasions, including during the exchange with the woman, who was not identified.

This week, the New Jersey Supreme Court ordered that a hearing be held in July about the recommendation from the state’s Advisory Committee on Judicial Conduct.

A lawyer for Russo declined to comment Friday night.

A 45-page report from the committee detailed four counts of alleged misconduct.

The first focused on an exchange between Russo and the woman who said she had been sexually assaulted, at a hearing in May 2016. The woman was seeking a restraining order against her alleged assailant, a man who she said had also threatened her life and made inappropriate comments to their child.

“Do you know how to stop somebody from having intercourse with you?” Russo asked the woman.

The woman detailed several ways she would try to stop the assualt, including trying to physically harm the attacker, saying “no” and running away.

“Run away, get away,” Russo said. “Anything else?”

“Block your body parts?” Russo added. “Close your legs? Call the police? Did you do any of those things?”

The judicial conduct committee said Russo’ “questioning of the plaintiff in this manner, to include hypotheticals, was wholly unwarranted, discourteous and inappropriate” and could “re-victimize the plaintiff.”

In its second count of alleged misconduct, the committee said Russo had abused his office by asking a family division manager to help change the scheduling of a guardianship hearing for the judge’s son, who has disabilities.

The committee’s third count said Russo should have recused himself from a hearing involving a man he knew from high school, whose pizza parlor the judge admitted to frequenting. The fourth count involved a nine-minute phone conversation about paternity testing that Russo had with a woman when the father, who was the plaintiff in the case, was not present.

The committee’s recommendation said Russo had admitted wrongdoing in the last two counts but denied it in the first two.

© 2019 New York Times News Service