On his most recent financial disclosure form, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. reported a single gift: $900 concert tickets from a German princess known for her links to conservative activists.
The disclosure does not list the event’s details, including the concert’s name, location or how many tickets the princess provided. But in an interview with a German news organization, the gift provider, Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, described Justice Alito and his wife as “private friends” and said the tickets were for the Regensburg Castle Festival, an annual summer celebration she hosts at her 500-room Bavarian castle.
The princess, known in earlier decades as a party-loving, art-collecting aristocrat and who was once christened Princess TNT for her explosive personality, has become known in recent years for her close relationships with several high-profile people who oppose the current pope, as well as with Stephen K. Bannon, the longtime ally of former President Donald J. Trump.
The disclosure only heightened the scrutiny around ethics at the Supreme Court, which has been in the spotlight after revelations that some of its members, most notably Justice Clarence Thomas, accepted luxury gifts and travel from wealthy benefactors without disclosing the largess on their mandatory annual financial forms.
“No matter the identity of the patron — whether it be a German princess, Queen Bey or the king of Dallas real estate — the justices should not be accepting expensive gifts,” Gabe Roth, who leads Fix the Court, an organization that has been critical of transparency on the court, said in response to Justice Alito’s disclosure.
Justice Alito, who did not respond to a request for comment on Sunday, had been the focus of a ProPublica report for failing to report a private jet flight paid for by a conservative billionaire who later had cases before the court. The flight was part of a luxury salmon-fishing trip. In an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal before the article was published, Justice Alito had argued that he did not have a conflict in accepting the “hospitality” and that he was not obligated to disclose the trip.
No dates were listed for the concert on Justice Alito’s latest form, which includes disclosures for 2023, and he did not list the number of tickets or provide information about lodging or transportation. An archived search of the festival’s 2023 schedule showed that it was scheduled to take place from July 14 to July 23 of that year.
The princess’s palace, the site of the festival, has been floated as the potential campus for a European network of finishing schools for far-right conservatives, according to a 2019 Financial Times interview with Mr. Bannon.
The princess has described Cardinal Raymond Burke, the American leader of the Catholic faction opposing Pope Francis, as being as close to her as a family priest. She has also played matchmaker between Gerhard Ludwig Müller, a German cardinal whom Francis fired from his position as the church’s top doctrinal watchdog, and Mr. Bannon, who has built relationships with far-right political parties in Germany and France.
Mr. Bannon has met with leaders of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany party and has spoken of his plans to create a “gladiator school” for the training of Catholics hostile to Francis.
Mr. Bannon could not be immediately reached for comment on Sunday. He is serving a four-month federal prison sentence on contempt of Congress charges for defying a subpoena in the investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The princess has also courted controversy in the past on issues of race. In 2001, she was reported to have said that the high rate of AIDS in Africa was because “Blacks like to copulate a lot.” She later sought to amend her comment and said the reason was the continent’s intense heat.
A 2008 interview described her as a committed Catholic who, relaxing in her Chelsea loft, “couldn’t have seemed more different from the media monster who burst onto the scene in the early ’80s as the wild-child bride of the bisexual billionaire Prince Johannes von Thurn und Taxis.”
The princess told an interviewer that she immersed herself in her religious beliefs after her husband’s death in 1990, when she was left to raise three children and to dig her way out of debts and inheritance taxes estimated at more than $350 million.
Since then, she has become known for hosting conservative Catholic salons and liturgical concerts in Rome, where she also has a palace.
She has also traveled to Lourdes, in southern France, as a volunteer through the Order of Malta. She also published a book of conversations with Cardinal Joachim Meisner, who had been known for his outspoken conservative views, including attempts to ban abortion in Germany, before his death in 2017.
Her statements and religious views have created controversies around her, including in 2019, when El Museo del Barrio in Harlem, the oldest museum in the United States focused on Latino art, withdrew its decision to honor her at its 50th anniversary gala.
The princess said in an email at the time that she was “disappointed to what degree the society is divided today and that there seems to be absolutely no room for tolerance whatsoever.”
She added that her “conservative religious views have absolutely no impact” on her “open mind on cultural diversity and inclusion,” and that she had “been friends with all sorts of people of different political and religious views all my life.”
Later that year, in October, the princess met at the Supreme Court with Justice Alito, along with Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, Cardinal Müller and Brian S. Brown, a prominent anti-L.G.B.T.Q. activist, according to a photo and post on the website for the International Organization for the Family.
Mr. Brown is listed as the president of the group, which says its mission is “to unite and equip leaders, organizations and families to affirm, celebrate and defend the natural family as the only fundamental and sustainable unit of society.”
The post Justice Alito Reported $900 Concert Tickets From a German Princess appeared first on New York Times.
