Over 50,000 shares, 450+ comments and one Ellen Page mention later, it’s clear you folks are really responding to our original Bill Pryor story. (Quick Recap: William H. Pryor Jr., one of Trump’s prospective Supreme Court nominees, issued a legal brief in 2003 that upheld a Texas law criminalizing consensual LGBT sex, which he compared to “polygamy, incest, pedophilia, prostitution, and adultery”. What’s more, he argued that states should be able to prosecute gay people as criminals. According to Pryor then, LGBT people as a group were not protected by the Constitution.)
Well it’s been little more than 24 hours and already new reports have sprung up about Donald Trump’s prospective Supreme Court nominee. Pryor is rumored to have appeared in a nudie magazine in the ‘80s, a claim he has vehemently denied.
Back in 1997, nude photos popped up on gay pornography website badpuppy.com (NSFW). No surprise there, except that the site Legal Schnauzer claimed in 2013 that the photos (of a naked, erect man) are actually of Pryor.
According to the site, more than a dozen of these photos of Pryor were taken in the early 1980s. The future judge was then a college student at the University of Louisiana.
These photos, whomever they are really of, appeared at least once in print and ultimately ended up online.
Perhaps most interesting, however, are Legal Schnauzer’s claims that Republican leaders who supported Pryor might have been using those photos to blackmail him.
Alabama law-enforcement officials became aware of the photos at badpuppy.com in 1997, not long before Governor Fob James appointed Pryor attorney general. An investigation ensued, and multiple officials familiar with that process have told Legal Schnauzer that the photos are, in fact, of the Bill Pryor who now sits on the U.S. Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals.
The Pryor photos likely appeared in at least one print publication in the 1980s and remained relatively unknown until an informant provided a tip to investigators with the Alabama Bureau of Investigations (ABI) that they had appeared in the digital world. A number of prominent Republicans became aware of the photos once they hit badpuppy.com, and a major Republican business/political figure confronted Pryor about them, a source tells Legal Schnauzer. The photos disappeared from badpuppy.com one day after that meeting, but ABI investigators already had captured screen shots that are dated September 17, 1997.
Were the FBI and the Senate Judiciary Committee made aware of Pryor’s connections to gay porn during his confirmation process? Our sources say the answer almost certainly is no, and in fact, the photos might have helped him get nominated over numerous conservative candidates who had far more judicial experience in the Eleventh Circuit. Pryor was elected Alabama attorney general in 1998, and was re-elected in 2002, but he had never served in a judicial capacity at the time of his nomination.
Why then was Pryor chosen, when many experts saw Sharon Lovelace Blackburn (now presiding judge in the Northern District of Alabama) as among numerous more qualified candidates? Our sources say high-level Republicans, likely including White House strategist Karl Rove, knew the gay-porn photos put Pryor in a weak position–and they would make him easy to control on the bench.
When Legal Schnauzer contacted Pryor via email about the allegations, he wrote back with the following:
Do not contact me again.
Bill Pryor
When pressed again, Pryor responded in this way:
Do not contact me again.
Bill Pryor
Let’s see if Pryor’s more willing to have this conversation in 2016…
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