The German Princess and the Supreme Court Justice

The princess was late for Mass.

Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis pulled a long dark coat over her silk scarf and necklace of pearls and hurried through the medieval monastery that is part of her 500-room palace. It was a chilly autumn night in Bavaria, with rain spitting outside, as she arrived at the chapel to pray.

The room glowed red, lit from a crypt below where her husband and other family members lay in their coffins. The princess knelt and soft bells sounded. Her dinner guests, a British baroness and her husband, slipped in to join her as a priest led prayers.

Princess Gloria, 64, who burst onto the international scene in the 1980s in jeweled tiaras and a multicolored mohawk, has since evolved into a conservative Catholic with ties to the European far right. An anti-abortion and anti-immigration provocateur in her native Germany, she has welcomed a newcomer into her circle as a hero: Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who was her guest at her annual music festival in the summer of 2023.

The visit opened up a world of European nobility to the justice, and helped the princess promote her causes and her festival. She sees it as a natural friendship.

“I met him as a Catholic, and I realized that he’s a judge who is pro-life,” she said in an interview at her palace in Regensburg, home to the music festival. “So for me, that was a great thing, because very few people I know are pro-life.”

The friendship came to light last month after the justice listed a single, curious gift on his annual financial disclosure form: “Gloria von Thurn und Taxis. Concert tickets. $900.” The Supreme Court was immediately inundated with questions from reporters, but Justice Alito did not elaborate or respond to requests for comment.

The princess, who once partied with Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol, was more forthcoming. Initially resistant to questions, she began to respond sporadically to text messages and eventually agreed to the interview at her palace.

“The only thing that I care about in politics is that somebody is fighting abortion and helping reproduction rates go up,” she said in the interview. “I think that killing our own offspring and reducing our reproduction rates, eventually, we will kill our own kind.”

She spoke in private quarters filled with modern art, including paintings by Keith Haring and Kehinde Wiley, after taking her visitors on a tour past the palace’s frescoes, immense chandeliers and books dating from the Holy Roman Empire.

The princess said she did not belong to a political party, but she spoke admiringly of Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, and she invited the far-right German politician Maximilian Krah to sit in the front row with her for a performance of “Carmen” at this summer’s music festival.

She is longtime friends with the Trump ally Stephen K. Bannon, who is serving time in prison for defying a congressional subpoena. The princess called him “a bad boy” and scoffed at a plan he once floated to use her palace as a “gladiator school” for the training of conservative nationalist leaders in Europe.

She said Mr. Bannon was just being “a salesman.”

“It’s so far away from reality that it’s ridiculous to even think about it,” she said.

To explain how she first met Justice Alito, it helps to starts from the beginning.

Princess TNT

Princess Gloria grew up with ties to nobility, but her parents had little family wealth. Her father was stationed with the German Foreign Office to build radio stations in Togo and Somalia, and the princess spent much of her childhood in Africa.

At 19, she met the 11th Prince of Thurn und Taxis, Johannes, an eccentric banker and industrialist who was then one of the richest men in Europe. They married in 1980, when she was 20 and he was 53.

Their riches included the palace, a property so large that Princess Gloria said she was still finding new rooms. She zips around the property in a golf cart.

Together, she and her husband traveled the world. Vanity Fair christened her “Princess TNT” for her explosive personality, calling her “a wild version” of her friend Princess Diana. She befriended Michael Jackson, rode Harley-Davidsons and had three children.

In 1990, the prince died from complications of a heart transplant, leaving her hundreds of millions of dollars in debt. She sold off the family jewels, 75,000 bottles of wine, silver and art, and opened the palace to the public as part of a summer music festival.

But becoming a widow and fighting to save the family fortune, she said, led her to return to the Catholicism of her childhood. It was a conservative Catholicism, more aligned with Pope Benedict than the more liberal views of Pope Francis. It was what brought her into the orbit of Justice Alito.

A Rightward Turn in Rome

Princess Gloria often escapes the gloom of Bavarian winters for Rome, where she spends months at a time in her palazzo overlooking the Roman Forum. It was in Rome that she met Justice Alito, at a Catholic conference. They were introduced over drinks by a mutual acquaintance, Father Thomas Joseph White, an American convert to Catholicism and an avid bluegrass banjoist. The princess’s son was his student.

The princess said she could not recall the date, other than that it was sometime after 2016 and before 2019. Justice Alito’s financial disclosures list only one conference in Rome during that period, a 2018 event sponsored by St. John’s University School of Law in New York, which has a program in Italy. The justice gave the keynote speech, “The Value of Tradition in the Global Context.”

Princess Gloria, always on the lookout for influential people to invite to her palace, said she did not recognize Justice Alito at first. But she immediately liked him and especially his wife, Martha-Ann, whom she described as “very fun, bubbly.” She quickly extended an invitation to her festival.

“If I meet people and I like them, I will immediately invite them to come,” she said. “I have admiration and great respect for the judge, and I have respect for his wife, who is the manager behind a man.”

She and the justice kept in touch. In 2019, Princess Gloria, along with Brian S. Brown, the president of the National Organization for Marriage, a nonprofit that works against the legalization of same-sex marriage, and Gerhard Ludwig Müller, a right-wing German cardinal, toured the Supreme Court, where they posed for a photo with Justices Alito and Brett M. Kavanaugh.

In July 2023, Justice Alito and Martha-Ann took the princess up on her invitation. They arranged for their own transportation to Regensburg, the princess said, and arrived behind the justice’s security detail.

Like the 20 or so other guests, they stayed in palace rooms decorated with original works of modern art overlooking the gardens and courtyard. Meals and lodging at the palace were covered by the princess. Under financial disclosure rules, the justices are not required to list meals and lodging considered personal hospitality, like a stay at a friend’s home. It is not clear how long the Alitos spent at the palace.

“It was a great honor for us that he accepted the invitation,” Princess Gloria said. “Of course I didn’t charge him any expenses. That’s rude.”

Guests watched “The Magic Flute” as well as a performance by a Michael Jackson tribute band. Tickets ranged from about $100 to $150. As in previous summers, the festival attracted more than 100 German demonstrators outside the palace grounds protesting the princess’s positions on abortion and immigration.

Between acts, her private guests mingled at tables in the courtyard. It was there that a local newspaper editor, Christian Eckl, recognized Justice Alito from news reports about the majority opinion he wrote in the 2022 Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and eliminated the constitutional right to abortion in the United States.

Mr. Eckl described Justice Alito as standing slightly apart from the rest of the guests, alone. He approached the justice and began to ask questions while recording a video of the encounter on his phone.

Justice Alito, Mr. Eckl said in an interview, did not seem eager to answer. But the justice did say that he had toured the town and beamed as he talked about his next destination, the Bayreuth Festival celebrating the work of Richard Wagner. Bayreuth tickets cost about $500 for premium seats and are highly coveted by opera fans around the world. People wait for years to secure a spot.

The princess arranged for the Alitos to attend the July 25 opening of Bayreuth as her guests. When the German government received word of their visit, she said, all three of them were moved into the government box, where they took in a new production of “Parsifal.”

Justice Alito left on the 2023 visit after revelations that he had failed to disclose a private jet trip to Alaska with a Republican donor who had repeatedly had cases before the Supreme Court.

Revelations only intensified as the term went on, including that an upside-down American flag had flown outside the justice’s Virginia home in the weeks after the Jan. 6 attacks on the Capitol. An “Appeal to Heaven” flag — a symbol of a push to remake American government in Christian terms — had also been spotted at his beach house in July, August and September 2023.

Princess Gloria is now traveling around Europe with a packed schedule and preparing for the Christmas season at the palace.

She has not spoken with the Alitos recently, she said, but she would love to see them the next time she is on the East Coast. The princess also said she would be thrilled to befriend other justices.

She knows who is at the top of her list.

“Justice Thomas,” she said, smiling. “Because he looks so nice.”

Source: New York Times