Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito revealed in an interview on “Fox News Sunday” that he has an “opinion” about who leaked the draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, but he stopped short of naming anyone, saying the evidence is not yet strong enough to do so.
Speaking with host Shannon Bream, Alito said he “anticipated” that the conservative majority’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health would “anger a great many people who believed and continue to believe” there is a constitutional right to an abortion.
However, the justice said he did not expect “the forms” the reaction to the ruling would take, describing some of that reaction as “extreme.”
“And I never dreamed that the draft of the opinion would be leaked. … That was totally unprecedented in the history of the country,” Alito told Bream.
He went on to call the leak a “grave breach of the trust that everybody who worked” at the high court had in one another.
The leak first surfaced in May 2022, when Politico reported, citing an initial draft majority opinion written by Alito, that the justices had voted to strike down the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which guaranteed a federal right to abortion access.
In the final ruling, five justices — Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas — struck down Roe along with Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision that had upheld it.
Alito told Bream the leak of the draft “very predictably” made him and his four colleagues “targets for assassination.”
The justice pointed to the case of a woman who traveled to Kavanaugh’s home in June 2022 with plans to assassinate him over the ruling.
That woman, Sophie Roske, was sentenced by a federal judge in October 2025 to more than eight years in prison. Prosecutors had asked for at least 30 years behind bars.
When Bream pressed Alito on whether he had a view on who was behind the leak, the justice answered that he did.
“I do have an opinion,” Alito said. “But the evidence available at this time is not strong enough for the court or for me to say this is the person who was responsible.”
The comments mark a notable moment from a sitting justice on one of the most consequential breaches in the Supreme Court’s history. The leak came ahead of a ruling that ended nearly five decades of federal abortion protections established under Roe, sending the issue back into the national spotlight.
Alito’s remarks underscore the lasting fallout from the leak, both inside the high court, where he said trust among those who worked there was gravely damaged, and outside it, where he said the justices in the majority became targets.
While Alito made clear he has his own view on who is responsible, he emphasized that neither he nor the court is in a position to publicly identify the leaker based on the evidence currently available.
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