Justice Samuel Alito says the Supreme Court majority needed courage to overturn Roe v. Wade after the draft leak, and warns physical threats now endanger the judiciary.
In a CBS News interview set to air in full Monday, the 76-year-old justice said the 2022 Dobbs decision demanded resolve once the draft opinion leaked to the press. Monday is also the day the Supreme Court opens its 2026-2027 term.
Alito wrote the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade and returned abortion policy to the states. The Daily Caller reported his latest comments on the pressure that followed.
He framed the choice in plain terms. Going forward after the leak carried real consequences for the justices who joined the majority.
"We didn’t know it when we produced the draft that was leaked, but it required courage to go ahead with that because of the implications,"
Alito also said he lost friends over the Dobbs ruling. That personal cost sits beside a sharper warning about violence and intimidation aimed at the Court itself.
Alito did not treat the harassment as ordinary political heat. He called it something different, and worse, for the country.
"The physical threats and the harassment represents something new in our society and something that is quite disturbing... And I think it’s a danger to the courts, and I think it’s a danger to others in public life,"
The timeline backs the concern. In May 2022, POLITICO reported it had obtained a draft of the Dobbs opinion before the Court released the decision. The final ruling came in June 2022.
Within days of that period, the danger turned concrete. U.S. Marshals encountered Nicholas Roske outside Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s house in Maryland. Roske, then a 29-year-old California resident, had a tactical knife, a firearm, and dozens of rounds of ammunition.
After his arrest, Roske said he was upset over the leaked Dobbs draft. He later pleaded guilty to attempting to assassinate Kavanaugh. In October 2025, he received an eight-year prison sentence.
The leak itself never produced a public culprit. A Supreme Court report in January 2023 said an eight-month investigation, including 126 formal interviews, had not identified who disclosed the draft.
The pressure did not fade with Roske’s case. On July 14, 2026, Justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett asked the House Appropriations Committee to raise Supreme Court security funding by 10% for fiscal year 2027.
Kagan told the committee threats against the Court rose 35% in 2026 and 25% the year before. Barrett described the personal toll in blunt family terms.
"didn’t expect that performing this service was going to put me in the position of explaining to my children what a bulletproof vest was and why I had to wear one."
Those are not abstract complaints. They are sitting justices describing armed protection as a routine part of the job. Kavanaugh, appointed by President Donald Trump, remains a target in the public record of that 2022 plot. Barrett, also a Trump appointee, has had to explain body armor to her own children.
Alito, appointed by former President George W. Bush, has stayed on the bench through years of intense scrutiny and repeated retirement questions. His CBS remarks place the Dobbs vote inside that longer stretch of hostility toward the Court.
A YouGov poll taken after the Sept. 10, 2025, assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk measured how Americans view political violence. Twenty-five percent of respondents who called themselves “very liberal” disagreed with the statement that “political violence is never justified.” Three percent of those who called themselves “very conservative” took the same position.
That gap matters when justices report climbing threats and a foiled murder plot tied to a leaked abortion opinion. The Court does not control street rhetoric. It does have to decide cases while living with the results.
Alito has already confirmed he will remain on the Court rather than step aside under pressure. The new interview shows why that choice carries weight. The same justice who wrote Dobbs is now describing courage as a requirement for doing the job at all.
His book “So Ordered,” from Hachette Book Group, is scheduled for release Tuesday. The CBS interview lands as the term begins, with the security record and the Roske sentence still fresh.
Alito has also committed to another term after months of speculation about his future. That continuity puts a long-serving conservative voice at the center of a Court still absorbing the fallout from Dobbs.
Dobbs did what the Constitution’s structure allows. It moved a contested policy question out of federal judicial control and back to voters and state legislatures. The reaction included a leak, a murder attempt, sustained harassment, and a security budget request measured in percentage hikes and bulletproof vests.
Alito called the physical threats “quite disturbing” and a danger to courts and public life. Kagan’s threat statistics and Barrett’s vest comment land in the same file. So does Roske’s eight-year sentence for showing up armed at a justice’s home over a draft opinion.
He has shut down retirement talk before and kept working. The courage he described was not theatrical. It was the decision to issue Dobbs after the draft was already in the open and the risks were obvious.
Lawful self-government cannot survive if justices need courage merely to publish an opinion the Constitution permits. Threats, plots, and a culture that excuses political violence are the failure, not the judges who refuse to yield to them.
