I have received the following e-mail from Alex Kozinski’s wife:

Mr. Frey:

My name is Marcy Tiffany. I have been married to Alex Kozinski for over thirty years and we have raised three sons together. First, let me thank you for making the effort to discover the truth about what happened, and for giving me an opportunity to respond to the stories that have been circulating about Alex.

Turning to the facts of the matter, the LA Times story, authored by Scott Glover, is riddled with half-truths, gross mischaracterizations and outright lies. One significant mischaracterization is that Alex was maintaining some kind of “website” to which he posted pornographic material.

Obviously, Glover’s use of the word “website” was intended to convey a false image of a carefully designed and maintained graphical interface, with text, pictures, sound and hyperlinks, such as businesses maintain or that individuals can set up on Facebook, rather than a bunch of random files located in one of many folders stored on our family’s file server. The “server” is actually just another home computer that sits next to my desk in our home office, and that we use to store files, perform back-ups, and route the Internet to the family network. It has no graphical interface, but if you know the precise location of a file, you can access it either from one of the home computers or remotely.

Using the term “website” also gives the impression that Alex was actively aware of all of the material, when, in fact, it had accumulated over a number of years and he didn’t even remember that some of that stuff had been stored there or whether it had been put there by him or one of our sons, who also have access to the server.

Glover also wrote that “the sexually explicit material on the site was extensive.” In fact, of the several hundred items in the “stuff” folder, the vast majority was cute, amusing, and not in the least bit sexual in nature. For example, there’s a program that lets you build a snowman (no private parts involved). There’s a “stress reliever” that lets you take a virtual hammer to your desktop (which I’ve been using a lot lately). There’s a picture of freshly painted double-yellow lines that go right over road kill, with the caption “not my job award.” There’s something called “cool juggle” that shows a video of a guy juggling who drops a ball outside the frame and becomes a stick figure when he goes to pick it up. There are over 300 individual items in the “stuff” folder, the vast majority of which are of this nature. In addition, this folder contains about a half-dozen items that, while humorous, also have some kind of sexual aspect. Most of these you have already identified on your website.

I would note that in addition to the “stuff” folder, which Alex and my sons used to store a hodge-podge of miscellaneous humorous items, we use to the server to store several dozen other folders that contain a lot of personal material. For example, there is a folder that has copies of papers my kids have written in school. There is another folder that has family photos. There is a folder that has copies of articles that Alex has written. Obviously, the advantage of using a server is so that we can access the material from other computers and also send family members and friends links that will allow them to see a specific item in a folder. For example, this allows me to send links to my sisters so that they can see the latest photo of our grandchild.

This brings us to another falsity in the LA Times article. The reporter describes the handful of comic-sexual items as follows: “the sexually explicit material on the site was extensive.” He then includes graphic descriptions that make the material sound like hard-core porn when, in fact, it is more accurately described as raunchy humor.

One especially egregious misrepresentation is that there was a “video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal.” In subsequent articles, including one in the S.F. Chronicle, this has been described as a “bestiality” video. In fact, as you reveal on your Blog, it is a widely available video of a man trying to relieve himself a field when he is attacked by a donkey he fights off with one hand while trying to hold up his pants with the other. I would note that there is a version of this video on YouTube that apparently aired on the Fox channel. Crude and juvenile, for sure, but not by any stretch of the imagination is it bestiality. The fact is, Alex is not into porn – he is into funny – and sometimes funny has a sexual character.

The tiny percentage of the material that was sexual in nature was all of a humorous character. For example, the “women’s crotches” was one of the many “camel toe” series that is widely available on the net. The insidious effect of these misleading descriptions is that even many of those who have come to Alex’s defense have expressed the view that judges are entitled to look at “porn” if they choose, as if that’s what was really going on here, when it is not.

I think that there is another very important piece of this story that has not received the attention it deserves, and that is the role of Cyrus Sanai.

Cyrus Sanai, a disgruntled attorney/litigant, has widely claimed credit for engineering this smear campaign. In a 2005 decision, District Judge Zilly USDC Western District Seattle, describes Sanai’s conduct in a case before him as “an indescribable abuse of the legal process, unlike anything this Judge has experienced in more than 17 years on the bench and 26 years in private practice: outrageous, disrespectful, and in bad faith.”

Judge Zilly references a decision by LA Superior Court Judge Elizabeth Grimes where she describes Sanai’s conduct in a different lawsuit as follows: “Plaintiff has proliferated needless, baseless pleadings that now occupy about 15 volumes of Superior Court files, not to mention the numerous briefs submitted in the course of the forays into the Court of Appeal and attempts to get before the Supreme Court, and not one pleading appears to have had substantial merit. The genesis of this lawsuit, and the unwarranted grief and expense it has spawned, are an outrage.”

Washington State Superior Court Judge Joseph A. Thibodeau also had a run-in with Sanai, who harassed him to the point that he had to recuse himself from Sanai’s case. I believe you have a copy of the transcript of that hearing. (You may want to link to Overlawyered.com which has some additional details about how Sanai’s conduct).

Sanai wrote a vicious attack against the Ninth Circuit panel (Judges Leavy, Gould and Clifton) that ruled against his efforts to get the federal court to take jurisdiction over his parents’ ugly divorce case. You can read his vitriol at www.ninthcircuit.us (a website obviously designed so that people trying to find the Ninth Circuit website would stumble on his page instead).

Alex, who did not participate in the decision, wrote a public defense of the panel, and thus made himself a target. Sanai apparently made it his mission to retaliate against Alex. He managed to access our private computer and copy these files, which he then shopped around to reporters for months. Finally, he got the LA Times reporter to print the story that set off this firestorm. Sanai not only admits his involvement in all this – he brags about it.

As to how Sanai accessed our server and was able to rummage through our personal files, frankly we are still trying figure it out. Apparently, if a person is able to find a link to an item in the “stuff” file, and he knows what he is doing, it is possible for him to reverse engineer his way into other items stored in that file without our knowledge or consent. Although we typically would only send links to friends and family – who would be unlikely to do such a thing and who would certainly not try to injure us with what they found if they did – it is possible that a link to something in the “stuff” file became public, and Sanai used it to access the other material stored there. Moreover, since there wasn’t anything that remotely resembles a “collection of porn” stored there, we didn’t pay as much attention to the security risks as we obviously should have.

This is a sad and dangerous lesson to anyone who dares to stand on principle and publicly speak out against people like Cyrus Sanai, who are willing to stop at nothing to wreak his petty vengeance on a good and decent man like my husband. It is even more disturbing that Sanai, who is a member of the bar and an officer of the court, can get away with attacking judge after judge after judge, in this fashion.

It is also an indictment of Scott Glover and the LA Times, who are willing to knowingly distort the facts and with cavalier disregard of the injury they are causing to the reputation of a brilliant and distinguished jurist, in order to sell a few newspapers. And then, of course, there are the bevy of other purportedly respectable publications such as the San Francisco Chronicle, that are willing to repeat Mr. Glover’s story, while adding embellishments and further mischaracterizations along the way. This is apparently what now substitutes for responsible journalism.

While I’m on the topic of responsible journalism, it has recently come to light that the LA Times learned about this material months ago, and sat on it until it would do the maximum damage. Selecting the jury was a very grueling undertaking. Over 150 potential jurors were screened for hour after painful hour on Monday and Tuesday. Scores of men and women took the trip into the jury box, only to leave soon thereafter because they confessed themselves unable to view the materials. A number of others disclosed embarrassing facts about themselves and their families in order to explain why they could not sit on this jury. It was a difficult and painful process for just about everyone who was called into the jury box. Finally, after considering 109 members of the panel, a jury was selected and sworn at the end of the day on Tuesday. And Glover was present in court while all this was going on, biding his time. Only on Wednesday, after the jury had started to hear the case – and jeopardy had attached – did the LA Times choose to “break” its story.

A newspaper – especially a major newspaper as the Los Angeles Times purports to be – is supposed to be a responsible member of the community, not a predator. If the presence of certain files on a judge’s computer is a truly a newsworthy matter, it would have been so months earlier, before Alex was assigned this trial, and certainly a few days earlier, before a jury had been chosen and the trial had commenced. But what excuse is there for timing the story with surgical precision so as to do maximum damage to the judicial process? In doing so, the LA Times caused the effort of the court, the parties and the 150 citizens who answered the call of duty by reporting for jury service from near and far to go to waste, just to make a big splash. This strikes me as worse than irresponsible.

On the brighter side, once again, it is the bloggers such as you, who are willing to look behind the story to discover the real facts. One can only hope that through these efforts, the truth will eventually come out.

Marcy J.K. Tiffany, Esq.