Justice Samuel Alito said the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade required courage from the majority, pointing to a disturbing rise in threats now endangering the courts and public life.
In a recent interview with CBS News set to air Monday, Associate Justice Samuel Alito described physical threats and harassment against judges as something new and deeply troubling in American life. The 76-year-old justice, appointed by former President George W. Bush, wrote the majority opinion in the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case that overturned Roe and returned abortion policy to the states.
The Daily Caller reported that Alito told CBS the leaked draft of Dobbs forced the majority to press ahead despite clear risks. He said the justices did not fully grasp those risks when the draft first circulated, but they understood the stakes once the leak hit.
“We didn’t know it when we produced the draft that was leaked, but it required courage to go ahead with that because of the implications,” Alito said.
He also lost friends over the ruling. That personal cost sat alongside a broader pattern of intimidation that has followed the Court since the draft opinion surfaced.
Alito did not soft-pedal the climate surrounding the judiciary. He framed the harassment as a direct threat to constitutional government, not mere political noise.
“The physical threats and the harassment represents something new in our society and something that is quite disturbing... And I think it’s a danger to the courts, and I think it’s a danger to others in public life,” he said.
Those words land against a documented record. In May 2022, POLITICO reported it had obtained a draft of the Dobbs opinion before the Court released the final decision. The leak shattered the Court’s traditional secrecy and set off weeks of protests, doxxing, and worse.
In June 2022, U.S. Marshals encountered Nicholas Roske, a 29-year-old California resident, outside Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home in Maryland. Roske carried a tactical knife, a firearm, and dozens of rounds of ammunition. After his arrest, he said he was upset over the leaked Dobbs draft. In October 2025, Roske was sentenced to eight years in prison after pleading guilty to attempting to assassinate Kavanaugh, a Trump appointee.
That plot was not an isolated episode. It fit a longer arc of pressure on the justices who restored the abortion issue to democratic debate rather than leave it locked inside federal courts. Alito has remained a steady conservative voice on the bench through that period, including when he addressed his future on the Court in earlier public remarks.
The security burden has reached the justices’ families. At a July 14, 2026, hearing before the House Appropriations Committee, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, another Trump appointee, described what the job had forced her to explain at home.
Barrett said she “didn’t expect that performing this service was going to put me in the position of explaining to my children what a bulletproof vest was and why I had to wear one.”
Justice Elena Kagan, appointed by President Barack Obama, appeared alongside Barrett. The two justices asked lawmakers for a 10 percent increase in Supreme Court security funding for fiscal year 2027. Kagan told the committee that threats against the Court rose 35 percent in 2026 and 25 percent the year before.
Those figures came years after the Court’s own leak investigation. In a January 2023 public report, investigators said they had conducted an eight-month probe spanning 126 formal interviews and still had not identified who leaked the Dobbs draft. The leaker walked free. The justices who signed the opinion lived with the consequences.
Alito’s willingness to speak plainly about that climate fits a broader pattern of candor from the Court’s conservative wing, including moments when he and Justice Clarence Thomas have dissented on high-profile process questions.
The threats did not arise in a vacuum. After the Dobbs leak, activists targeted justices’ homes and turned disagreement over abortion into street pressure and, in Roske’s case, an assassination attempt. The same period saw sustained rhetoric casting the majority as illegitimate for returning a contested issue to voters and state legislatures.
A YouGov poll taken after the Sept. 10, 2025, assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk underscored the imbalance. Twenty-five percent of respondents who identified as “very liberal” disagreed that “political violence is never justified.” Only 3 percent of those who identified as “very conservative” took that position.
Alito’s interview did not dwell on partisan scorekeeping. He focused on the institutional damage. When judges need armed protection and must teach their children about body armor, the rule of law is already under strain. The courage he described was the decision to finish the legal work anyway.
Dobbs did not invent abortion as a political fight. It ended the Court’s half-century experiment in removing that fight from ordinary politics. States regained the power to set policy. Voters regained the power to reward or punish those choices. That is how a constitutional republic is supposed to work. The violent backlash treated democratic accountability itself as the offense.
Readers tracking Alito’s long tenure will recall earlier speculation about his plans; coverage of his confirmation he would serve another term closed one chapter of that debate while the security crisis continued.
The full CBS interview airs Monday, the same day the Supreme Court begins its 2026-2027 term. Alito’s book, “So Ordered,” is scheduled for release Tuesday. The timing places his warnings about threats and courage at the start of another year of high-stakes cases.
CBS News posted a summary of the interview on X on October 2, 2026. The network noted Alito’s comments on lost friendships, the courage required after the leak, and his description of threats as “quite disturbing” and “a danger for the courts.”
None of this is abstract. Roske brought a gun and a knife to a justice’s house because a draft opinion leaked. Barrett had to explain a bulletproof vest to her children. Kagan cited double-digit jumps in threats two years running. The Court asked Congress for more security money. The leaker was never publicly identified.
Alito’s record on the Court has included sharp internal debates and public scrutiny, including lighter personal recollections such as Clarence Thomas’s story about Alito’s Yale years. The current moment is heavier. It is about whether justices can decide cases without fearing for their families.
Earlier reporting also examined questions around Alito’s timeline and the Court’s future composition, but the justice’s latest remarks kept the focus on institutional safety rather than personnel speculation.
The majority in Dobbs did the hard thing in public. They restored a power the Constitution never assigned to nine lawyers in the first place. The campaign of threats that followed tried to make that correction too costly to repeat. Alito’s blunt assessment is that the cost is already too high for a free society to accept.
Judges who need bodyguards to do their jobs are a warning, not a talking point. A country that shrugs at assassination plots against the bench is playing with the foundation of ordered liberty.