Samuel Alito, the US supreme court justice, accepted $900 concert tickets from a Catholic German aristocrat known for her unabashed conservative views and ties to rightwing activists, his latest financial disclosure form reveals.
Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis reportedly gifted the tickets to Alito and his wife to allow them to attend the Regensburg castle festival, an annual summer music extravaganza hosted at her 500-room castle in Bavaria.
The princess, a descendant of princes of the Holy Roman empire, is noted for ties with Steve Bannon, a key supporter and former aide of Donald Trump, and connections to figures in the Catholic hierarchy opposed to Pope Francis.
Her donation to Alito is set out in the justice’s annual financial disclosure report, which he filed late after requesting an extension.
The declaration follows a series of controversies over the ethics of supreme court justices amid revelations that some, including Alito himself and Justice Clarence Thomas, have accepted gifts from wealthy benefactors without disclosing on mandatory forms.
Alito has been at the centre of reports that he accepted a private jet free travel gift for a luxury salmon fishing trip from a conservative billionaire who had cases pending before the supreme court.
He previously met von Thurn und Taxis along with fellow justice Brett Kavanaugh when she visited the supreme court in 2019 along with Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, who was dismissed from his position as head of the Catholic’s church’s doctrinal body by Pope Francis, and Brian Brown, a leading anti-LGBTQ+ activist.
Von Thurn und Taxis’s palatial castle in Regensburg – the venue for the concert attended by Alito and his wife – has been mooted by Bannon as a potential venue for a European network of finishing schools for rightwing conservatives.
Once nicknamed Princess TNT by Vanity Fair for her supposedly combustible personality, the princess previously affected a less traditional persona and was known for associating with the likes of Mick Jagger, Jerry Hall and Michael Jackson.
A Tatler profile featuring a 1980s photo of her sporting a luxuriantly punk hairstyle, described her as “equal parts Helena Bonham Carter and Princess Diana”, adding: “She struck the socialite community with her outgoing personality and her rambunctious punk aesthetic.”
After he reinvention as a conservative Catholic activist, she drew criticism in 2001 after saying on a television talkshow that the high rate of Aids in Africa was due, not to a lack of safe sex, but because “the Blacks like to copulate a lot”. She later tried to amend her remarks, saying Africans had a lot of sex due to the continent’s hot climate.
