Bill Pryor, as a drummer at Northeast Louisiana University
After a raucous confirmation process, Brett Kavanaugh stands as Exhibit A of a federal judge who lacks the temperament, integrity, and impartiality to sit on the federal bench.
Consider Bill Pryor, who sits on the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals (Alabama, Georgia, Florida) and has an office at his "duty station" in Birmingham's Hugo Black Courthouse, as Exhibit B. In essence, Pryor is a closeted-gay version of Brett Kavanaugh, perhaps even more far to the right politically -- and both were on Donald Trump's short list of U.S. Supreme Court nominees. Pryor apparently fell out of favor -- opening the door for Kavanaugh -- and that likely is because of our reporting about his forays into gay pornography, with nude photos appearing at badpuppy.com in the late 1990s.
Shane Rogers-Mauro, a Fort Lauderdale, Florida, man who says Pryor sexually harassed him while the two were classmates at Northeast Louisiana University (NLU, now University of Louisiana Monroe), uses terms like "cruel" and "evil" to describe the Pryor he knew in college and read about since the judge's rise to political infamy as a closeted gay who is virulently anti-LGBT in his public statements. Rogers-Mauro says he has notes about others who have told him Pryor sexually harassed them at NLU.
Shane Rogers in the NLU Marching Band
In fact, Rogers-Mauro has seen Pryor's cruelty in a most personal way. Jealous over a relationship Rogers-Mauro was having in college (he was Shane Rogers then, and Rogers-Mauro is his married name), Pryor outed his classmate. Says Rogers-Mauro:I was in a band fraternity -- Kappa Kappa Psi -- when Bill discovered I was seeing someone else, and he decided to out me to the rest of the band. Back then, outing was rotten thing to do because people were pretty much in closet. In fact, I would say that outing me, alone, was a form of sexual harassment. I was ostracized in the fraternity, and it pretty much ended my time in that organization.
Bill has a self loathing outlook, with his anti-gay opinions in court and in his public statements. That is so old school and disgusting to us all.
Rogers-Mauro said Pryor was an annoying, abrasive presence on the NLU campus, especially in the close-knit band community:
I don't have a lot of dirty stories about Bill; I never had any sexual interaction with him. He's got a wife and kids, which is pretty shocking. That is him in Bad Puppy. He was known as gay -- he was in percussion, a drummer -- and he had a mouth on him, saying things, about politics and other subjects, that he shouldn't have been saying. We worked together in work-study, so we got to know each other pretty well.
I'm surprised he's an appellate-court judge. Not only is he not the right person for the job, with all of his prejudices, but I've never seen someone so conservative and cruel. We wrote Bill off as a pure radical; he was always glorifying Reagan. His views are so far right -- he was Republican this and Republican that.
This guy's evil. I've had no contact with him since college. From opinions and statements of last 20 years, I can see it's only gotten worse. How can he be a judge of others when he's so prejudiced in one direction. That goes beyond homosexuality or anything like that. He will try to get as high as he can. He's one of those power grabbers. You can't make judicial decisions in the right way when you are so far on the fringe.
As a federal judge, Pryor appears to be a successful individual -- on the surface -- and Rogers-Mauro did not see that one coming:
I never thought twice about him being successful in anything. People would walk the other way when he was coming toward them because they did not want to deal with that kind of aggressiveness. I'm 53 now, and I've never seen anyone so radical in entire life.
He's gotten higher than he ever should have. I find it hard to believe Bill could be impartial in anything. And others who know him can't believe he's a judge. He's just very aggressive, very evil.
