An Alaska federal prosecutor said she felt pressured to send nude photos to a federal judge who was promoting her for a potential judicial appointment of her own, according to newly unsealed court documents.
“Judge (Joshua) Kindred used his position of authority as a federal judge to force me into an emotionally manipulative and abusive relationship,” the prosecutor wrote to Judicial Council of the Ninth Circuit investigators in August 2024.
She felt trapped, she wrote, because she knew he had “the power to ruin not only my career, but my personal life as well.”
Former Alaska federal judge Joshua Kindred resigned in July after a sexual misconduct investigation found he’d pursued a sexual relationship with a law clerk and exchanged explicit photos with the federal prosecutor, whose office appeared before him regularly, among other conduct.
The prosecutor’s own account of what happened was made public for the first time Monday when a judge unsealed filings included a cyberstalking case in which the defendant’s conviction was overturned because of the undisclosed conflict between Kindred and the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Rolando Hernandez-Zamora was granted a new trial that ended in a conviction. He has now been sentenced to four and a half years in prison followed by three years of supervised release.
The criminal case is among dozens now being challenged by defense attorneys on grounds that the tangle of conflicts created by the judge’s sexualized relationships were not properly disclosed.
The senior Alaska federal prosecutor is not named in the filings but has been widely identified in media accounts. The Daily News generally does not publish the names of people who assert that they are victims of sexual abuse or misconduct.
The federal prosecutor has reportedly been moved to the civil litigation section of the U.S. Attorney’s Office. The office did not respond to a request for information about her current employment status. She could not be reached for this report.
Kindred could not be reached for this article.
Kindred’s conduct had been under investigation for months when the senior prosecutor turned in a written statement to the Judicial Council dated Feb. 23, 2023. She denied having a sexualized relationship with the judge.
“I do not now, nor have I ever had a romantic, intimate, or close personal relationship with Judge Kindred. I have not sought such a relationship with Judge Kindred. My relationship with Judge Kindred has always been courteous, but professional,” the statement said.
Then her account changed. On Aug. 9, 2024, after Kindred had resigned and the judicial investigation had been made public, the federal prosecutor submitted a second statement to investigators that contradicted her earlier account.
The new statement describes how the two first met during the coronavirus pandemic lockdown and interacted at the federal building gym, and got to know each other as the prosecutor spoke to Kindred about a networking group involving judges and attorneys she hoped to start.
The statement describes Kindred boasting about how he would soon be the chief judge of the Alaska federal court and bragging about his political connections, referring to U.S. Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan as “Lisa” and “Dan.” Kindred told the senior prosecutor he thought she was “great” and had included her name in a list of potential federal judicial candidates, the statement said.
“As soon as he told me he’d recommended me for a federal judgeship, he started asking me to send him nude photos,” the statement said.
The federal prosecutor wrote that at first she said no but then agreed, “feeling pressured to appease Judge Kindred given his inherent position of power and authority over me as a federal judge, his ability to influence decisions in the U.S. Attorney’s Office and his influence over my future.”
Starting around December 2021, the two exchanged explicit nude photos over the encrypted messaging app Signal, she wrote. The photos were “demeaning,” she wrote.
Kindred sent her photos of his genitals, asking for “compliments,” the statement contends. If she didn’t respond quickly enough, he’d get angry, she wrote. He told her that he “had to participate in a program due to his rage problems,” that he was “extremely petty, holds grudges, and he had taken revenge on someone in the past,” she wrote.
Later, Kindred told her she’d made Murkowski’s short list for possible federal judgeship nominees, the statement said.
“He said he was a gentleman, so he wasn’t going to ask for anything in return. However, after he left the gym he messaged me and insinuated that I should find a way to thank him. He also implied he had the power, ability and willingness to ruin everything if he did not get what he wanted. I asked him what he wanted. He said he wanted more photos.”
Through a spokesperson, Murkowski simply said the assertion that Kindred would have influenced her judicial choices was “bullshit.”
Sullivan’s office also disputed that Kindred had had influence over judicial nominations.
“Sen. Sullivan believes that Josh Kindred is a disgrace and should be disbarred,” his spokesperson said. “Senator Sullivan never talked to Kindred about any nominee to the federal bench and has rarely talked to Kindred ever.”
In the second statement, the prosecutor wrote that she initially didn’t disclose the sexual texts to investigators because she was “afraid of what Judge Kindred would do if he found out.”
In at least one instance, the U.S. Attorney’s Office itself has doubted, in court filings, the veracity of her statements, saying they could be a self-serving excuse for why she didn’t tell investigators the true nature of her relationship with the judge earlier.
“There is reason to question the accuracy” of both of the senior prosecutor’s statements because “they are inconsistent with each other,” and her explanation “could be interpreted as a self serving attempt to excuse her failure to notify either the United States Attorney’s Office or opposing counsel in cases before Judge Kindred of her personal relationship with him,” the U.S. Attorney from Oregon, now representing the government in the cyberstalking case, wrote in a footnote of a filing in the Hernandez-Zamora case.
The issue is government misconduct, said Jamie McGrady, the head of the Alaska Federal Defender Agency.
“We share the government’s suspicion about the veracity of (the senior prosecutor’s) account,” McGrady wrote in an email.
The senior prosecutor and Kindred continued messaging on a different encrypted app, Telegram, even after the Ninth Circuit investigation began, McGrady wrote — and the prosecutor “appeared in his courtroom for numerous trials and hearings ... when she was not the attorney of record.”
“These circumstances demand further investigation into her relationship with Kindred, her decision to keep it secret, and whether their secret relationship affected the fairness of other prosecutions.”
The U.S. Attorney’s Office “had an obligation to disclose it to defendants appearing before Kindred as soon as they found out” about what was happening between the senior prosecutor and attorney, wrote Jamie McGrady, the head of the agency, in an email. Management in the office knew as early as October 2022 and reported it to the chief judge but “hid it from defense counsel and even their own line prosecutors,” McGrady wrote.
“Management at the U.S. Attorney’s Office effectively helped Kindred keep judging cases for nearly two years when he should have been off the bench immediately.”
In September, Murkowski wrote that she was “aware” of a Department of Justice investigation into the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Anchorage. The nature of that investigation is not clear, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office has not confirmed it.
This story has been republished with permission from the original at the Anchorage Daily News.