(NewsNation) — Progressive filmmaker Lauren Windsor said that “extreme measures” drove her to pretend to be a religious conservative and secretly record her conversations with Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and his wife Martha-Ann.
The recordings reveal that Martha-Ann Alito wants to get back at people who criticized her and her husband for flying politically affiliated flags at their homes.
“You come after me, I’m gonna give it back to you,” Martha-Ann Alito said in the recording of a private conversation at the Supreme Court Historical Society’s June 3 annual dinner. “There will be a way; it doesn’t have to be now, but there will be a way they know,” she added. “Don’t worry about it.”
The recordings were published by MSNBC and Windsor’s activist site The Undercurrent — the second set released Monday after previous recordings of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Alito in Rolling Stone.
Alito’s flag controversy began last month when it was discovered that an “Appeal to Heaven” flag and an upside-down American flag were flown at the couple’s homes. The symbols have been associated with far-right politics, Christian nationalism, and were displayed by some of those who participated in the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.
In the recording, Martha-Ann Alito also committed to flying a “Sacred Heart of Jesus” flag at her homes this month to protest the display of an LGBTQ Pride flag nearby. The Sacred Heart of Jesus flag is a symbol associated with the Christian right wing, specifically used to protest Pride.
She said that her husband, the justice, has asked her not to put up flags at their properties.
“I won’t do that because I’m deferring to you,” Alito said she told her husband. “But when you are free of this nonsense, I’m putting it up and I’m gonna send them a message every day, maybe every week, I’ll be changing the flags.”
Windsor’s conversation with Justice Alito included him agreeing with her assertion that the U.S. should strive to be a Christian nation and his admission that much of the court’s business comes down to political ideology. Roberts pushed back against those ideas in the pair’s recorded conversation.
The recordings give insight into the political and religious biases present in the justice system.
“It’s easy for anyone to find anything offensive,” Windsor said when NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo asked why she only chose to record Republicans. “It’s a matter of degree. I don’t think that any of the liberal justices would betray a sense of ‘we can’t be impartial to the cases that are before this court.'”
Nick Robertson of “The Hill” contributed to this report.