Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser, who is facing a highly contentious re-election fight in Wisconsin, appeared Monday night on Fox News, for an interview with Wisconsin native Greta Van Susteren. The vote is taking place today.
As TPM has noted, a state Supreme Court election would not normally be national news. But in the wake of Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s legislation curtailing public employee unions, and the political protests that gripped the state and attracted national attention, the court race has quickly turned into a proxy political battle. Conservatives are supporting Prosser, and liberals backing Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg. The polls close at 8 p.m. CT tonight.
Van Susteren asked Prosser about a negative campaign ad from a liberal group, the Greater Wisconsin Committee, attacking Prosser’s handling of a priest sex abuse case in the late 1970s, when he was a district attorney, in which the priest was not prosecuted. The priest was transferred to another community, and later convicted in 2004 on these original charges. One of the victims has strongly criticized the attack ad against Prosser, not wanting his case to be used in the state’s current political battles.
“I knew this family. And when they came to me and told me about the abuse, I was very sensitive and I did not want to betray the mother, who was a classmate of mine, and I wanted to take all conscientious care of the two kids involved,” said Prosser.
“This was never a matter of my not believing the two boys, or trying to sweep something under the rug. It was a question of having really kind of ambiguous information, ambiguous evidence, that I didn’t think would go well at trial. It would have been the credibility of two young boys against a fairly prominent priest.”
“So my goal was to try to get the priest out of the parish, to get the priest treatment. And I honestly never suspected that he was a serial offender — that was not something that was in people’s consciousness back then.”
Van Susteren also asked Prosser about another story that’s dogged him in this election — revelations that in 2010, during a heated argument, he called Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson “a total bitch”. Prosser has told reporters that he “probably overreacted,” at the time, but also that his outburst was “entirely warranted” against the behavior of some of the court’s other members.
Van Susteren asked: “What in the world is going on in the Wisconsin Supreme Court that you’re saying that kind of stuff to each other, and snitching on each other, and giving e-mails out, and disclosing the private conversations of the state Supreme Court? What is going on?”
“Well, there’s a lot to try to untangle there,” Prosser responded. “We’re talking about an incident that occurred more than a year ago. We’re talking about something where multiple controversies came to a head at the same time. It was an explosive situation. I said something I should not have said, and that I regret, and that I apologized for.
“On the other hand, I want people to understand that I didn’t simply go into a private conversation and suddenly pop out with this ill-advised statement, without any provocation. Things had been building up for a long time.”
