In the 18 years since her family left their New Jersey home and entered some of Washington’s most exclusive circles, Martha-Ann Alito has never sought or cultivated a particularly public identity.
As the wife of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., Ms. Alito described living a largely private life since his confirmation to the Supreme Court in 2006 – one that relied on raising two children and supporting her husband through scrutiny and scrutiny Acumen supported. bent politics.
On the few occasions she appeared before an audience or spoke to reporters, Ms. Alito often spoke about herself in terms of her role in a close-knit nuclear family that held her together during her husband’s meteoric attempt to rise within the judiciary .
“The most amazing thing is why people care about our lives,” she said in a 2006 interview, reflecting on Judge Alito’s confirmation hearing, which at one point reduced her to tears and sparked a discussion about the toll partisanship takes on nominees can demand ‘ relatives.
But as New York Times reporting raised questions about how and why an upside-down American flag appeared outside her family’s home in Alexandria, Virginia, just days after rioters at the Capitol carried the same flag on January 6, 2021, Mrs. Alito said , 70, is suddenly at the center of the controversy. Her husband said she left it there in the middle of a neighborhood argument.
When the family was about to move to Washington, the Alitos’ children were college age. Ms. Alito described how she welcomed the change after giving up her career as a librarian to work full-time as a homemaker and mother.
But the arduous preparations and harsh reception that Judge Alito received in Congress left a bitter memory that Ms. Alito would publicly recall years later, denouncing the proceedings and the media coverage of them.
“For me personally, the two months before that were the most terrible part of our lives,” she said when introducing her husband at an awards ceremony in April 2007. “And fortunately I wasn’t in Washington, so I didn’t have to read or look at the newspapers , look at the blogs or look at the computer, and I’ve maintained that standard – I don’t read anymore unless I decide to pick up a book.”
The pointed questions Judge Alito faced from Democrats about his views on abortion, his affiliation with a conservative Princeton alumni group and whether he would follow the court’s precedents struck Ms. Alito as humiliating.
“The way the world is these days, Sam is nowhere near an immediate threat to civil liberties,” she said in the 2006 interview.
Overcoming that sharp transition reflected the upheavals of her childhood, which Ms. Alito has spoken about publicly. Her father, who worked as an air traffic controller in the Air Force, regularly moved the family between outposts in Texas, Florida, Maine and the Azores Islands in Portugal. Her mother worked as a librarian on the bases where they lived.
After following her mother’s path and becoming a librarian for a public library in New Jersey, the U.S. attorney’s office in Newark and the Justice Department, Ms. Alito built a limited public life in Washington, focused mostly on nonpolitical projects and charity work .
When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s husband, Martin Ginsburg, died in 2010, Ms. Alito organized the publication of a cookbook as a tribute to his culinary passions. In honor of her father’s contributions, she also spoke about her work leading a group working to end homelessness among veterans.
While some partners of other Supreme Court justices — such as Jane Sullivan Roberts or Virginia Thomas — have been embroiled in controversies over their professional lives and political leanings in recent years, that is not the case with Ms. Alito.
Only on rare occasions have Mrs. Alito’s personal dealings attracted any attention: once after she and Judge Alito shared a meal with a couple who later claimed they had been told in advance of the decision in a pending case, and another time when it came to supplies and minerals, interests she had inherited from her father raised minor concerns about conflicts of interest in cases her husband could decide.
Ms. Alito graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1976 with a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature and in 1977 with a master’s degree in library science. She met Judge Alito in the law library when he was an assistant U.S. attorney. The two married in 1985, five years after their first date, in the church where he was baptized.
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2024-05-29 09:05:09
www.nytimes.com
