Exclusive: Justice Alito sold Bud Light stock amidst anti-trans boycott effort

Alito did not respond to questions about the sale, but its timing raises fair questions — particularly in light of other recent ethical questions.

[Update: For follow-up coverage of this, see Law Dork’s May 20 coverage here.]

At 4:37 p.m. on Sunday, August 13, 2023, far-right, anti-LGBTQ influencer Chaya Raichik of Libs of TikTok posted a pre-transition photograph of transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, calling her “a dude,” on Twitter, now known as X.¹ 

The post came months into a manufactured, anti-transgender controversy over Mulvaney’s minor participation in a Bud Light March Madness campaign, which led to a boycott of the beer and its maker, Anheuser-Busch, more broadly. By mid-May, The Wall Street Journal reported on how the boycott was leading to a downswing in Bud Light sales and upswings in sales of both Miller Light and Coors Light, both made by Molson Coors.

Raichik’s post followed stories at the end of July and beginning of August detailing the negative effects of the boycott on the beer’s brand and sales. As of this weekend, the post had more than 8 million views, per X’s data, most of which were likely amassed in the days after it was posted last summer. As with most of what Raichik does, the post was intended to inflame the passions of anti-trans people online, and it worked — although it also prompted responses from Mulvaney’s supporters as well. By the next morning, Ari Drennen, the LGBTQ program director at Media Matters, posted a video of Mulvaney with a supportive note:

Later that day, something happened more quietly as well: According to a periodic transaction report posted but now unavailable in the Federal Judicial Financial Disclosure Reports database, Justice Sam Alito sold at least some of his stock in Anheuser-Busch and bought stock in Molson Coors on Monday, August 14, 2023.

Alito did not respond to a request for comment about the sale and purchase or whether it was related to the boycott, the coverage of the purported effects of the boycott on Anheuser-Busch sales, or Raichik’s post. Alito would not even provide confirmation of the accuracy of the previously posted periodic transaction report. 

According to Fix the Court’s Gabe Roth, who downloaded the report, it was one of a handful of new reports available this past week in the database and he had "no reason to doubt their veracity.” 

[Update, 2:00 p.m. May 20: Justice Sam Alito’s August 30, 2023, periodic transaction report is, once again, appearing in the Federal Judicial Financial Disclosure Reports database, so that part of this is cleared up.]

Alito’s behavior is similar — both in timing and in substance — to other boycott-related activity and coverage.

Whether Alito was participating in the boycott matters, moreover, for one of the several reasons it matters why there was an upside-down American flag flying at his house on Jan. 17, 2021, as The New York Times reported earlier this week, and what he knew about that. 

The answer to both sets of questions says something about whether his participation in related cases is ethical. As Alito agreed to when the justices announced their code of conduct, “A Justice should not engage in other political activity.” 

As The New York Times explained it in their report about the inverted flag — which was being used at the time by those who had tried to overturn the election and were decrying the fact that Joe Biden would be taking office on January 20, 2021 — judicial ethics codes “stress[] the need for judges to remain independent and avoid political statements or opinions on matters that could come before them.”

Participating in a boycott is undeniably a political statement. And there are pending cases for which participation in an anti-trans beer boycott could be seen as his having a finger on the scale of justice on the side of the anti-trans advocates supporting — and in some cases, defending — these laws such that recusal could be required. 

Under federal law, Alito is directed to recuse himself from cases in which his “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.“ Another provision directs recusal where a judge “has a personal bias or prejudice concerning a party” in a case.

Alito’s stock-switch came a month after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit became the first appeals court in the nation to allow a ban on gender-affirming care for minors to go into effect. Although an early ruling in a case out of Tennessee, the order made it clear that laws restricting transgender people’s freedom would likely be reaching the high court sooner rather than later.

They did, after the Sixth Circuit ruled on Sept. 28, 2023, that the Tennessee and Kentucky bans are likely constitutional. The challengers of both laws, as well as the Biden administration, soon thereafter urged the Supreme Court to take up appeals of that decision. 

On May 16, the justices considered for the first time whether to grant those petitions and hear one or more of the appeals in the fall — cases in which the justices are being asked to decide, among other questions, whether the bans on gender-affirming care for minors violate the constitutional guarantee of equal protection of the laws.

It is not yet clear whether Alito will be participating in the cases, but he did not recuse himself from participating in the April shadow docket ruling that allowed Idaho to enforce its ban on gender-affirming care for minors during the state’s appeal below. We also know that Alito has a narrow view of those ethical constraints, given his refusal in September 2023 to recuse himself from a key tax case still pending before the justices in which he had a relationship with a law firm partner representing one of the parties in the case.

In short, there is no reason to believe Alito would recuse himself from the consideration of the Tennessee and Kentucky cases.

The court could announce as soon as Monday what it will be doing with the cases.

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Raichik’s August 13, 2023, post was just another flash-point — even from her — in the hate-filled attack on Mulvaney and Anheuser-Busch.

The whole thing began when Mulvaney participated in a Bud Light March Madness promotional campaign in, of course, March of 2023. As them reported, Anheuser-Busch later “released a special line of Pride-themed cans with various pronouns” and, in celebration of Mulvaney’s one-year anniversary of transitioning, sent her “a special can of Bud Light” that included her face and a supportive message. After Mulvaney posted about that on April 1, 2023, the backlash took off.

It was, as The Wall Street Journal reported in May of 2023, not unusual — either in terms of the company partnering with influencers or in terms of it being pro-LGBTQ. Nonetheless, it led to attacks and a boycott effort from anti-trans activists, as well as “anti-woke” individuals like Travis Tritt, whose April 5, 2023, post on X had more than 24 million views as of this weekend. 

As time went on, the New York Post and Wall Street Journal, among other even more ideological publications, were dragging Anheuser-Busch for its handling of the backlash as well as the claimed effects, often with sympathetic framing for the boycott itself.

On August 1, a New York Post headline declared, “Sales of Miller Lite, Coors Light crush Bud Light after Dylan Mulvaney fiasco.” 

On August 8, 2023, the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal — a space Alito is know to favor — ran a column, “Why Woke Capitalism Works for Ben & Jerry’s,” that contained the subhead: “Politics is central to its mission but a distraction from Anheuser-Busch’s, Disney’s and BlackRock’s.”

Anson Frericks — a former Anheuser-Busch executive whose Strive Asset Management (co-founded with Vivek Ramaswamy) runs on the idea that the corporate world isn’t worried enough about “value to investors” — wrote in the column that “Bud Light’s controversial partnership with transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney in April didn’t create a ‘future with more cheers,’” as Anheuser-Busch’s mission states, “or make Bud Light ‘easy to enjoy,’” as the company declares. Instead, Frericks continued, “It thrust the brand into a charged political discussion unrelated to the company’s mission. Loyal consumers left, and shareholders are paying the price as billions of dollars in market cap have been erased.”

Five days later, that Sunday, came Raichik’s post. Raichik has faced substantial criticism for the hateful focus of her online activity. In February of this year, NBC News reported that it had “identified 33 instances, starting in November 2020, when people or institutions singled out by Libs of TikTok later reported bomb threats or other violent intimidation.” They included 21 bomb threats.

The day after Raichik’s post, on Monday, August 14, 2023, according to the periodic transaction report, Alito sold between $1,000 and $15,000 worth of Anheuser-Busch stock. (According to an earlier financial disclosure report, he had purchased less than $15,000 worth of Anheuser-Busch stock on March 1, 2022, and reported a dividend of less than $1,000 on those shares by the end of 2022. That report was only made public in late August 2023 — after Alito had already, we now know, sold at least some of the shares.)

The same Monday, Alito bought Molson Coors stock within the same dollar range. (He also, according to the report, purchased shares in Sealed Air Corporation — the maker of, among other products, bubble wrap — on that date.) 

Periodic transaction reports detail any stock transaction valued at over $1,000 and are required to be submitted by judges — including justices — within 45 days of the transaction, under the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, as amended by the Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act of 2022 to include federal judges. Alito’s report for these transactions was marked as being filed August 30, 2023. Under another part of the 2022 law, the reports are later posted online by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.

Fix the Court’s Roth, who regularly tracks the justices’ financial disclosures, told Law Dork that on May 15, he “noticed newly posted transaction reports from Justices Alito (three reports), [Neil] Gorsuch (one) and [Stephen] Breyer [retired] (one), which I downloaded.”

By the end of this past week, the Alito and Breyer reports were no longer showing up in the database. 

“Unfortunately, and possibly due to the newness of the system, this is something that happens from time to time — a stock report or disclosure is on there one day and disappears the next, typically to be posted again a little while later, all without explanation,” Roth explained, adding that the lag-time in posting relates both to the newness of the system and the pure mass of reports the office needs to post. “They simply don't have the staff to review and post reports in a timely manner, though each month the turnaround time does improve.”

As to the Alito reports specifically, he noted, “The two non-beer-related Alito PTRs — which describe transactions related to the spinoff of Johnson & Johnson’s consumer products business to a new entity, Kenvue (Alito has owned J&J shares since 2012) — have zero political implications, so I have no reason to doubt their veracity or that of the third report with the beer companies.” 

The media office in the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts did not respond on Friday to a request from Law Dork for clarification about what happened to the posted version of Alito’s report.

[Update, 2:00 p.m. May 20: As noted above, Justice Sam Alito’s August 30, 2023, periodic transaction report is, once again, appearing in the Federal Judicial Financial Disclosure Reports database, so that part of this is cleared up.]

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Justice Sam Alito sold Anheuser-Busch stocks on August 14, 2023, according to the report.

Now, if that’s all he had done, one might be open to the possibility that he just decided to get rid of a stock that he saw having a rough time. But, the fact that he also purchased Molson Coors stock in the same price range on the same date, in addition to all of the outside activity, makes it significantly more likely that it was a boycott-related action.

There is enough there — facts and dates — to at least merit Alito providing an explanation for why he made those transactions on that date, specifically whether it was part of a heavily publicized anti-trans boycott that was ongoing as cases addressing trans rights were percolating in the lower courts and, he knew, could reach the Supreme Court any day.

As Fix the Court’s Roth put it, “It's possible the sale was innocuous, or not related to the controversy, but given Alito's priors, he's lost the benefit of the doubt in my view.”

That bigger picture is important when looking at these transactions. At oral arguments, in decisions, and apparently at his household, Alito regularly shows signs of how enmeshed he is within the far-right political fights of the day. What’s more, Alito has strived — particularly over the past two years — to make himself a part of the far-right political grievance factory. 

As detailed at length previously at Law Dork, Alito has had a cozy relationship with the Wall Street Journal opinion pages, including three pieces featuring him as the interview subject or author in 2023. The last of those, an interview, came out July 28, 2023 — less than two weeks before the same opinion pages covered the anti-trans Mulvaney boycott and less than three weeks before Alito sold the shares. That’s not confirmation of his motive, but it is a statement of fact that this was a topic of discussion in the world into which Alito affirmatively and repeatedly placed himself during that time.

It was, in fact, an aspect of this cozy relationship that had led to the calls for recusal that Alito dismissed in the September 2023 statement — a statement issued nine days after he submitted his periodic transaction report regarding the beer stock transactions.

1. Law Dork is not linking to Raichik’s account, but the post can easily be found given the identifying information provided in this article.