SAN FRANCISCO _ Six former clerks and externs said 9th U.S. Circuit Court Judge Alex Kozinski made inappropriate sexual comments to them, The Washington Post reported Friday.
Heidi Bond, a Kozinski clerk from 2006 to 2007, told the Post that Kozinski called her into his office repeatedly, showed her pornography on his computer and asked if it aroused her or if she thought it was photoshopped.
Kozinski, 67, reached by the Los Angeles Times on Friday, said: "I have no recollection of that happening."
He said Bond, now a novelist, was a "good clerk," and he recommended her for two clerkships at the U.S. Supreme Court.
After Bond left the legal profession, he said, she sent him an email asking if he wanted an audio version of one of her novels. Kozinski described it as a romance novel with one chapter containing "very torrid sex."
Kozinski said he was unaware of any formal complaint against him and noted that he has employed 120 clerks and 400 externs over the years.
"If this is all they are able to dredge up after 35 years, I am not too worried," he said in a telephone interview.
The Post said those who complained about Kozinski worked for him over the years, the latest in 2012.
Bond and Emily Murphy, now a law professor, were the only women who agreed to allow the Post to use their names.
Murphy, who clerked for a different 9th Circuit judge, said Kozinski joked to her in front of other people that she should work out naked at a courthouse gym because so few people used it, according to the Post.
The Times reported in 2008 that Kozinski distributed crude jokes on an email list, and some of them contained pornographic pictures.
Kozinski asked for a judicial investigation. The probe determined that the judge had not intended the public to see the material and that Kozinski had not realized his private server could be viewed on the internet.
A panel of federal judges from another circuit admonished him, saying the folder had been made public because of an improper security configuration and the judge's "carelessness."
Kozinski, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, is considered a Libertarian and an iconoclast who has used the bench to float quirky ideas.
In one case, he wrote that lethal injection should be scrapped for the firing squad, though he thought the guillotine the best method.
Kozinski said Friday that he wished "Heidi had said something to me."
Although stressing he did not remember any such incidents, he said: "I wish she could have talked to me about it."
He said he often uses "salty" language at work and once learned from his secretary that it offended a male clerk who was a Mormon. Kozinski said he stopped using the language.
"I don't remember ever showing pornographic material to my clerks," he said.
