At 11:35am we received the following press release from the Office of Supreme Court Justice J. Michael Eakin.

The media reports today about inappropriate material sent unsolicited to my private email account.

Yesterday, Justice McCaffery caused certain material, sent to my private email account some years ago, to be given to the media. I have not seen the material, nor do I wish to, but insofar as receiving such may be seen as violative of the rules of conduct, I have referred the matter to the Judicial Conduct Board. I do so not to avoid any responsibility I may bear, but to assure expeditious, candid, and complete evaluation of the matter.

My letter to the Conduct Board is appended. I have no further comment on the matter at this time.

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Dear Board Members:

I attach a statement I have released to the media this date.

Yesterday morning, October 16, I returned a call to Justice McCaffrey at 8:22 am. Justice McCaffrey was extremely upset with the Chief Justice’s recent public statements, becoming more agitated as the call progressed. While I do not attempt to reconstruct the entirety of the call, I offer here the details pertinent to the situation.

Justice McCaffrey said he was receiving communications from “people”, and that “they” had in their possession inappropriate emails that involved me. He described the purported nature of the emails, which involved my private “John Smith” Yahoo email account. Specifically, he named one person that was on the other end of the email exchange, to convince me that they did exist and that he had seen them personally.

The subject of much recent publicity concerning the sending of salacious emails, Justice McCaffrey next told me he “was not going down alone.” Justice McCaffrey told me that I had to cause the Chief Justice to retract his media statements of the prior day. I told him I would not attempt to do so even if it were possible. He repeated that I had to, and that he “needed an answer” by noon to prevent release of the emails involving my account.

I told him I would not attempt to sway the Chief Justice or anyone else because of a threat or to avoid the consequences, however unpleasant that may turn out to be. I specifically told him that I was not a “fixer”, and that his demand was totally inappropriate. After making a series of other allegations against several other people not relevant to the instant situation, he repeated that I had until noon to get back to him.

When the call ended, I went to Philadelphia where I had meetings scheduled. I did not get back to him. At approximately 3:30 I entered the new family law courthouse where reporters from both the Daily News and Inquirer approached me. One reporter said that about an hour earlier, there arrived on his desk a pack or packet of emails from 2010 involving my private email account, that they were “racy.” I replied I had not seen them and could not comment.

To be clear, I still have not seen them. I have no reason to question the media’s description of them, and that these were received, not sent. (I opened a “John Smith” account years ago specifically to preclude identification of the court or my position on all personal matters, from sales confirmations to my electric bill.) That said, in an abundance of caution, I am hereby reporting the matter to the Board, and trust that you will determine if any violation of the rules on my part has occurred. I will certainly cooperate fully in your efforts.

Archive video May 21, 2007 Judge Seamus McCaffery.

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October 15th 12:58pm

As released by the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts.

HARRISBURG — On Friday, Oct. 10, 2014, Chief Justice Ronald D. Castille met with a forensic technician from Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane’s office in response to the chief justice's request that the office produce all emails involving sexually explicit materials sent by or to a member of the judiciary. The agent reported that the Office of the Attorney General searched its archive of emails for the period from late 2008 to May 2012 for all emails involving any justice of the Supreme Court and identified 4,000 such emails. Two-thousand eight hundred of the emails were identified as involving Justice Seamus McCaffery.

An examination by the agent of the 2,800 emails involving Justice McCaffery identified 234 emails that contained sexually explicit or pornographic photographs or videos, all of which had been sent by or to Justice McCaffery. No other Supreme Court justice was identified as having sent or received any sexually explicit emails.

The attorney general’s agent advised the chief justice that the 234 emails contained 1,502 sexually explicit images and 60 sexually explicit video files, some of which were duplicates. He estimated the number of unique images at 700 to 800 and the number of unique videos at approximately 45. The agent provided the chief justice with heavily redacted copies of the emails without the attachments and displayed many of the images and videos on a laptop computer.

The large majority of emails were sent by Justice McCaffery to an agent of the Office of Attorney General who has since retired. The agent then forwarded the materials to numerous individuals, most of whose names were redacted in the copies provided to the chief justice.

This matter is under further review by the Supreme Court.

Photo/Natalie Cake - James Roxbury and Chief Justice Castille May 2013.