Alito’s former neighbor says justice is ‘at best mistaken’ in flap over upside-down US flag

CNN

By John Fritze, CNN

(CNN) — A former neighbor of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito on Wednesday disputed his account of a neighborhood spat that led to the hoisting of an upside-down US flag on his property in Virginia, saying that his timeline of what happened is wrong.

“At best, he’s mistaken, but at worst, he’s just outright lying,” Emily Baden told CNN’s Erin Burnett on “OutFront” in her first television interview since the flag incident made national headlines. “Even if it were a valid excuse that they were having a dispute with a neighbor and that made them put the flag up, that timeline just disproves it. It just doesn’t make sense.”

Baden has emerged as a central figure in the evolving story of two provocative flags seen at Alito’s properties, an upside-down US flag hoisted at his home in Virginia in early 2021 and an “Appeal to Heaven” flag at his New Jersey home last summer. Alito has said the flag in Virginia was a response to a “very nasty neighborhood dispute,” that apparently involved Baden.

Alito has said that his wife, Martha-Ann Alito, hoisted the flag in response to an exchange with Baden in which she at one point used the term “c*nt.” But Baden said that exchange didn’t happen until mid-February. The story came to light when the New York Times published a photo in May of the inverted American flag flying weeks earlier, on January 17, 2021.

Records obtained by CNN show that Baden’s then-boyfriend called police on February 15, 2021, to complain about Martha-Ann Alito, accusing her of “unprompted” harassment.

The caller said they believed the confrontations were based on yard signs they had put up that were critical of former President Donald Trump.

Baden, who no longer lives in the neighborhood, described the exchange with the Alitos in sharp detail Wednesday. She said that Justice Alito “didn’t do anything” as she exchanged words with his wife.

“He just kept walking,” Baden said. “And basically disappeared.”

Baden said she regrets using the profanity if it “distracts from that real message.”

One of the signs that Baden put on the lawn read, “You are complicit.”

Alito has claimed that some of the neighborhood signs were directed at his wife. Baden told CNN on Wednesday that the sign was not directed at either of the Alitos.

The New York Times subsequently published a photograph of the “Appeal to Heaven” flag at the couple’s New Jersey property. The flag, which has a history dating to the Revolutionary War, has also become a symbol for Trump supporters. Both the “Appeal to Heaven” flag and inverted US flags were seen at the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

The incidents have drawn mounting criticism from Democratic and some Republican lawmakers. Several Democrats have called on Alito to recuse from cases involving the attack on the Capitol.

In an unusual response late last month, Alito told lawmakers he had nothing to do with the flags and that they were not intended to convey support for Trump or the Capitol attack. Explicitly declining to recuse, Alito said the decisions to hoist the flags were made by his wife.

“My wife is fond of flying flags,” Alito wrote. “I am not.”

The Supreme Court is weighing major cases tied to the 2020 election and the attack on the US Capitol. In one, the justices are weighing Trump’s claim of absolute immunity from special counsel Jack Smith’s election subversion charges. In another, a January 6 rioter is challenging an obstruction charge filed against him by prosecutors, arguing that Congress intended that law to apply to people destroying evidence, not storming a government building.

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