9 months ago
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Federalist Society founder and conservative Supreme Court architect Leonard Leo has a big problem with free speech, it turns out, when that free speech is directed at him. The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer has the scoop on a civil lawsuit just filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maine which alleges that Leo “urged police to violate the First Amendment rights of a demonstrator near his Maine home.”
Leo’s home is “a lavish $3.3-million waterfront estate in Northeast Harbor, Maine, on Mount Desert Island.” It’s a wealthy community that didn’t unanimously welcome Leo with open arms when he moved in back in 2018. In fact, he’s been the target of protests because of his activism in engineering the far right’s takeover of the Supreme Court. That was especially true last summer, following the court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, which ended federal abortion rights protections. It was after that decision, in the midst of one of these protests, that the alleged confrontation occurred.
“On July 31st, Anna Durand, a local inn owner, was on her way to one such protest with her son Eli Durand-McDonnell, a twenty-three-year-old landscaper,” Mayer writes. The two spotted Leo and his family walking, and both yelled out the car window at him. Durand-McDonnell remembers yelling something like, “You’re a fucking fascist” out the window as they drove by and continued on to the protest. That was where it got ridiculous.
