Kane releases offensive emails

Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane on Thursday publicly released 48 emails of Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice J. Michael Eakin - many with images of naked women, and others with crude jokes - and said they demonstrated that a misconduct case against him had been wrongly dismissed.

The pictures and videos mainly depicted topless women, though several showed full frontal nudity. One contained a graphic depiction of a sex act.

The supposed jokes mocked gays, lesbians, feminists, drunken college girls, and, in one message, nuns.

In an email that Kane previously described in a letter to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, a friend sent Eakin a picture of an overweight woman on her hands and knees dressed to resemble a pig.

In most cases, Eakin was the recipient of the messages, not the sender. Of the 48 emails, he sent three.

In two of those, he exchanged off-color chatter with golfing buddies, in part about a club called Dollhouse. In a third, he shared a cartoon in which a grade-school boy makes a joke about his teacher's breasts.

Eakin, 66, a Republican and former Cumberland County prosecutor whose term extends through 2019, did not return phone calls Thursday. A week ago, he apologized, saying the emails "do not reflect my character or beliefs."

Kane's decision to make the emails public - her staff gave them to reporters on a computer disk - represented a significant escalation of her sharp dispute with the high court and Judicial Conduct Board, which both cleared Eakin of any ethics violation last year.

The board concluded last year that Eakin's emails were only "mildly pornographic." At the same time, a special counsel hired by the Supreme Court identified only one of the justice's messages as having "offensive sexual content," and said his other emails were "unremarkable."

In a statement Thursday, Kane again said that she found the justice's messages to be "pornographic, misogynistic, and racist."

She released them on the same day that the Supreme Court's suspension of her law license took effect. The high court pulled her license until the outcome of a pending criminal trial in what prosecutors say was an illegal leak of grand jury material in a bid to embarrass a critic.

In her statement, Kane took an unusual swipe at her second-in-command, First Deputy Bruce Beemer, who now has added authority in the office due to her license suspension.

She said Beemer had examined Eakin's emails last year, along with the judicial panel's chief counsel, Robert A. Graci, and the Supreme Court's counsel, Robert L. Byer. Yet Beemer joined the other men in granting Eakin a pass, Kane said.

"I cannot explain why Mr. Beemer, Mr. Graci and Mr. Byer all viewed Justice Eakin's emails and made the representations they did," she wrote.

Graci said Thursday, "The board will not be responding to Ms. Kane's releases."

Byer and Beemer declined to comment.

The 48 emails contained 38 photographs and six videos that depicted nudity or partial nudity. The emails included nine duplicate messages. In some cases, the justice received the same email from more than one sender.

The emails were culled from a much larger set that Kane made available for scrutiny last year by both the judicial panel and Byer. The other emails in that group raised no issues.

That pool was distinct from another group of 988 Eakin emails that Kane said she turned up only after finding the first set. This second group, which has not yet been made public, also is said to contain some troubling emails that ridicule blacks, Latinos, Muslims, and domestic-violence victims.

Kane accused Graci of ignoring word from the Attorney General's Office that he should review the second set of 988 emails.

"Why Mr. Graci chose to shut down his investigation knowing that he has not seen all of Justice Eakin's emails . . . only Mr. Graci can explain," Kane wrote.

Graci declined Thursday, as he had done previously, to say whether Kane had alerted him to additional emails and, if so, what he did in response.

Despite Graci's failure to follow up with that set, Kane said, he and Byer both were well aware of the emails she made public Thursday.

Without making the images public, Kane sent some of Eakin's emails to the conduct board and Supreme Court in late 2014. She had discovered the emails during her office's investigation into the handling of the Jerry Sandusky sexual-abuse case by her predecessors.

This inquiry led technicians to search the office's email servers. She ended up with copies of Eakin's messages - even though he used the name "John Smith" in them - because they were captured on those servers. Staffers in her office were in on the email chains that included the justice.

Many of the emails sent to Eakin also included prosecutors, defense attorneys, and other lawyers - men and women - leading Kane to question a clubby culture among the group of recipients.

Kane first publicly criticized Eakin on Oct. 1, hours after she had been charged with a fresh count of perjury in her criminal case.

The previous month, Eakin had joined the rest of the court in voting to suspend Kane's law license after her arrest on perjury, obstruction, conspiracy, and other charges.

This is the second time in a year that scandal over offensive emails has roiled the high court.

Last year, Seamus McCaffery, a Democrat, resigned from office after disclosure that he had exchanged X-rated material in emails.

cmccoy@phillynews.com

215-854-4821@CraigRMcCoy

Inquirer staff writers Chris Palmer and Dylan Purcell contributed to this article.