<
https://abovethelaw.com/2026/05/judiciary-tried-to-hide-sex-in-chambers-judges-name-it-left-a-roadmap-to-identify-eleanor-ross-instead/>
"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."
Via Brad Koehn, who wrote "Your pseudonym doesn’t get you any anonymity at all"
and Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
