Legal Docket: The life beside his

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JENNY ROUGH, HOST: It’s Monday the 20th of July.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Jenny Rough.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Time now for Legal Docket. Every Supreme Court justice has a public life. Few Americans know much about the spouses who share it.

My colleague Jenny recently sat down with Martha-Ann Alito, wife of Justice Samuel Alito. What began as a conversation about an official portrait became something even richer—a portrait of Martha-Ann herself.

ROUGH: Martha-Ann Alito was on a mission. As the wife of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, she knew the time had come to get his portrait painted.

MARTHA-ANN ALITO: It was after my father died. He died in July of 2012, so in the fall of 2013, I started thinking about it more and more…

…thinking about the fleeting nature of life, her husband’s career of public service, and his legacy.

A friend suggested an artist named Igor Babailov.

ALITO: Igor is amazing because he was born in Russia and was trained in the Russian Academy of Arts. From the age of 7 on, he was taken from his home to the academy. … Igor initially came to Canada … and then he wanted to become an American citizen, so he is a naturalized American citizen.

Babailov has painted public figures like Pope Benedict and baseball legend Reggie Jackson, politicians on both sides of the aisle, like George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton, as well as families, and even pets.

A Supreme Court justice doesn’t have to get a portrait done.

ALITO: It’s a preferred outcome. You’re a justice and you need to be remembered in posterity.

The portraits are traditionally painted while the justice is actively serving, but then hung in the hallways of the Supreme Court building after the justice has retired or died. Typically, the justice’s former clerks contribute money to cover the cost. Only a few former justices have never had a portrait done, like the intensely private Justice David Souter, who died last year.

Justice Alito is also a private and quiet man. He demurred to the portrait. But Martha-Ann knew its value. A great portrait would capture not only the visual image of Justice Alito, but his life story, too.

ALITO: By January, I just decided it was going to get done. I was going to be the first test case.

Babailov could paint her portrait, and if her husband liked it, Babailov could paint the justice. Or Sam, as you’ll hear Martha-Ann call him.

To paint a portrait, Babailov starts with an in-person session. He makes a bunch of sketches while his wife, Mary, takes photographs from different angles.

ALITO: Igor is very precise. He comes in and he gives you an hour where you need to be still.

Babailov then returns to his studio to finish his work. About a six-month process.

The portrait shows Martha-Ann standing in what he describes as a cross between a library and a church with a stone wall behind her.

ALITO: And he decided I always do this with my hands [clasps hands] so he decided he had to do my hands this way.

They’re clasped together in a calm and gentle manner, which Babailov described as almost like a prayer. She’s wearing a deep purple silk blouse and red velvet blazer. She chose her outfit, but many of the details in the painting were a surprise: A wonderful surprise.

She’s next to a bookshelf full of books. Martha-Ann’s father was an air traffic controller in the military, and to this day, she can identify an airplane in the sky simply by sound. Her mother was a librarian. So Martha-Ann grew up surrounded by books.

ALITO: So I was always in the library. And I was an only child. And when my father was overseas, I had to go from school to the library so I could be attended to.

Martha-Ann eventually became a librarian herself. The Peace Corps wanted to send her to St. Lucia to create a library focused on agriculture. But on the cusp of accepting, she had second thoughts. As a military kid, she had lived all over, places like the Azores, Texas, France, and Maine. She never felt like she had a home.

ALITO: I felt as though I were a child of the universe.

She started thinking about her ancestors who had settled in Newark, New Jersey. Ultimately, she took a job at the U.S. Attorney’s Office there. And that’s how she came to know a lawyer named Sam Alito.

Today, lawyers use computers to do most of their research. But in 1980, they needed books. Some of the lawyers came to the library more regularly than others.

ALITO: This one person kept coming in. And then one day, I’m taking information to another office, and they’re all gathered around this one person who has been coming into the library. And they said, you learned Russian this weekend, I hear. And I’m like, ding, ding, ding! This one is very smart!

She had always imagined a marriage full of rich, intellectual conversation. And also?

ALITO: That my future husband should have oval fingernails because I have squatty stubs. And this arm reaches over my shoulder to get a book. And there are oval fingernails.

The two married in 1985. In Babailov’s portrait of Martha-Ann, he painted a photo of the Alitos. A mini picture frame placed on one of the bookshelves near a Bible.

Babailov also incorporated irises and lilies into the work, two of Martha-Ann’s favorite flowers.

ALITO: I love lilies. Lilies are an indication of purity…

She also notes they’re a symbol of the trinity.

Martha-Ann remembers being drawn to the church even as a girl. Her mother was a Presbyterian and her father was Baptist. When Martha-Ann was two, the family moved to the Azores and regularly attended church. She loved Sunday school.

ALITO: And I couldn’t get enough of Jesus. … And then when we came back to the United States, we always went to a Sunday non-denominational chaplain led-church on the Air Force base in Texas.

Sometimes she attended a Latin mass with a family friend, or the Presbyterian church with her grandmother.

ALITO: It was just that it was such deep mystery. … The world is just so powerfully put together. And big. And interesting.

In fourth grade, her family moved to France where she and her mother toured the cathedrals. As the years passed, Martha-Ann felt drawn to Catholicism. Two years after she and Justice Alito married, she officially joined the church.

The Alitos have two kids, Philip and Laura.

Martha-Ann jokes she was never a young mother, but she was once the mother of young children. When her kids were little, she went on her first spiritual retreat. She spent a rainy weekend at the beach.

ALITO: I have no expectation of what I’m going to do on this retreat except be silent, be in a room, and have guidance.

One talk covered the Bible passage of Martha and Mary. Jesus comes to visit them, and Martha’s distracted with preparations while Mary sits at his feet.

ALITO: And I was stung by it because as a child, I was so proud of my name, Martha. Because it meant a homemaker … and that’s what I wanted to do. Because my mother worked. … I begged her to be home with milk and cookies. And I knew when I was older, I was going to be married and have children, and I was going to be Martha.

And she was. Strong. Decisive. Efficient. She had a blast doing very Martha things, like cooking an entire Italian dinner from scratch, to honor her Italian husband’s roots.

ALITO: I made the olive bread which I had to pit the olives in those days … Kalamata olives,. I made the arrabbiata sauce from scratch. I made the rolled-out pasta so that I could fill it with the artichokes and grated mozzarella and the spices. … He was very happy, my husband.

In his portrait, Babailov included a stained-glass window on the stone wall. The image in the glass is of Saint Martha. And inscribed on the stone wall next to that window? The words of Jesus from that famous Martha-Mary passage in Luke 10: …only one thing is necessary.

ALITO: I asked him to put that in French because I lived in France as a child. And I went back to school in my academic college years. And I just thought, it will make people think more if they have to look it up. … But they can see it’s Luke. He does put the scriptural annotation there.

Justice Alito was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2006. Dealing with the intense pressure of being in the public eye became a daily reality for the Alitos. Martha-Ann’s strong personality has occasionally landed her in—as one friend put it—“trouble.”

But Martha-Ann says that over the years, she’s become more contemplative. Perhaps one example of that is her reaction to the leaked opinion during the 2021-2022 Supreme Court term. Justice Alito penned the majority decision in Dobbs versus Jackson, a case the public was watching closely. Dobbs held that the constitution does not confer a right to abortion. It overturned Roe versus Wade. Fifty-three days before the court announced its ruling, Politico published a draft it had obtained from an unrevealed source. Before it did so, Politico called the Supreme Court.

ALITO: Politico calls John Roberts and says we have Dobbs, and we’re going to print it. And Sam is stricken.

Martha-Ann was with her husband in his office. It was a Friday.

ALITO: And I said, Sam, first of all … it’s Friday afternoon. … They aren’t publishing it today, or tomorrow, or even on Sunday. And I said, I don’t know when they’ll publish it, but don’t sweat it, you know?

The Alitos were whisked away.

ALITO: I didn’t care if they hurt Sam or me. I really didn’t care. All I cared about was my two children and how they were going to have to deal with this.

Martha-Ann keeps her portrait tucked away upstairs at home. But it convinced her husband. And a few years later, Babailov painted Justice Alito. His portrait was unveiled at a ceremony with his law clerks in 2021. Babailov placed Justice Alito in the Great Hall of the Supreme Court. The marble floor and pillars in the wide open space created a background full of light.

Here’s Babailov:

BABAILOV: It’s very strong and monumental. … You know the expression simplicity is genius? … You see there is this incredible, grandiose space of the Great Hall. And it makes you think: A great man in a great hall.

Just like in Martha-Ann’s portrait, Babailov painted Justice Alito standing, instead of seated. A crowd of people gather in the background.

BABAILOV: He’s like one of those pillars. … He’s the person of the people. … Because that’s what Supreme Court justices do. …They represent the … American people … and of course the Constitution, which is like … it defends the rights of the people. It’s not designed for the elite. It’s designed for the common person.

Of Martha-Ann’s portrait, Babailov says this:

BABAILOV: Martha-Ann is a very incredible woman, if you know [laughs]. … Everything is taken into consideration when you capture a person … her background, her professional background, her faith … the little tilt of her head.

Of course, no portrait can capture every detail. I loved learning that Martha-Ann drives a convertible and used to play lacrosse. She recently returned from a pilgrimage in Poland. She says if she ever disappears, it’ll be to Zakopane, a mountain town she describes as traditional and where there’s never an empty seat in the church.

But no matter where she is, she’s reminded to look at the one necessary thing.

ALITO: God always provides for you. He always provides for you.

For now, the Alitos remain in Washington, D.C. The justice’s portrait hangs in his office. Someday it will join the others in the Supreme Court hallways. Her portrait is still in the Alito’s home, quietly telling the story behind his.

That’s this week’s Legal Docket.

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