Mother Jones; John Minchillo/AP, Jessica Hill/AP
On Wednesday, the Dwight D. Opperman Foundation announced the 2024 recipients of the Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Leadership Award. The winners: businessman Elon Musk, right-wing media kingpin Rupert Murdoch, lifestyle guru Martha Stewart, felonious Wall Streeter turned philanthropist Mike Milken, and actor Sylvester Stallone. The Foundation hailed these “iconic individuals” for their “extraordinary achievements.”
Veteran corporate lawyer Brendan Sullivan, who was Oliver North’s attorney during the Iran-contra scandal and who now chairs the RBG Award, noted, “The honorees reflect the integrity and achievement that defined Justice Ginsburg’s career and legend.” And the chair of the foundation, Julie Opperman, a big Republican donor and the widow of publishing titan Dwight Opperman, who once was CEO of Thomson Reuters, remarked that the award embraces “the fullness of Justice Ginsburg’s legacy.”
Attaching Ginsburg’s name to Musk, who has amplified racist and antisemitic posts and ideas on X, and Murdoch, whose Fox News purposefully spread Trump’s disinformation about the 2020 election and has repeatedly deployed falsehoods to challenge and undermine the values that Ginsburg fought for her entire life, seemed an odd and inappropriate choice. That’s what Ginsburg’s family believes.
It has released a statement denouncing the awards:
The decision of the Opperman Foundation to bestow the RBG Women’s Leadership Award on this year’s slate of awardees is an affront to the memory of our mother and grandmother, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Her legacy is one of deep commitment to justice and to the proposition that all persons deserve what she called “equal citizenship stature” under the Constitution. She was a singularly powerful voice for the equality and empowerment of women, including their ability to control their own bodies. As it was originally conceived and named, the Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Woman of Leadership Award honored that legacy by recognizing “an extraordinary woman who has exercised a positive and notable influence on society and served as an exemplary role model in both principles and practice.” This year, the Opperman Foundation has strayed far from the original mission of the award and from what Justice Ginsburg stood for.
The Justice’s family wish to make clear that they do not support using their mother’s name to celebrate this year’s slate of awardees, and that the Justice’s family has no affiliation with and does not endorse this award.
The statement noted that the Ginsburg family—the Supreme Court justice died in 2020—”fully supports the sentiments expressed” in a letter Trevor Morrison, a professor of law at New York University and a former clerk for Ginsburg, sent to Julie Opperman on Friday. He wrote that he was “appalled” by the news of these awards. Morrison pointed out:
Justice Ginsburg’s extraordinary legacy is one of a deep commitment to justice and to the proposition that all persons deserve what she called “equal citizenship stature” under the Constitution. She was a singularly powerful voice for the equality and empowerment of women, including their ability to control their own bodies. Beyond those substantive values, Justice Ginsburg had an abiding commitment to careful, rigorous analysis and to fair-minded engagement with people of opposing views.
It is difficult to see how the decision to bestow the RBG Award on this year’s slate reflects any appreciation for—or even awareness of—these dimensions of the Justice’s legacy. I will not single out any awardee individually, and I do not mean to raise the same objections about each of them. But I do mean to register in the strongest terms my concern that not everyone on this year’s slate reflects the values to which the Justice dedicated her career, and for which the Justice is rightly revered around the world.
According to Morrison, the foundation did not consult Ginsburg’s family about the awardees. He informed Opperman that Ginsburg’s two children, Jane and James Ginsburg, “have indicated to me that, unless the original award criteria, as accepted by Justice Ginsburg, are restored, they very much want their mother’s name to be removed from the award.” He added, “Each of this year’s awardees has achieved notable success in their careers, and each may well deserve accolades of one form or another. But the decision to bestow upon them the particular honor of the RBG Award is a striking betrayal of the Justice’s legacy.”
Julie Opperman according to Federal Election Commission filings, is a major Republican donor. In 2016, she donated $50,000 to Rebuilding America Now, a super PAC founded by Paul Manafort and Tom Barrack—two top Trump advisers—to support the Trump presidential campaign. That year, she also donated $2,700, the legal maximum, directly to the Trump campaign. In 2020 Opperman contributed $200,000 to Republican campaigns and PACs, including a $100,000 donation to the Take Back The House 2020 PAC and $92,000 to the National Republican Congressional Committee.
The awards are to be handed out April 13 at a gala at the Library of Congress that will be part of an “exclusive three-day event for 100 invited guests,” which, according to the foundation, is the “most anticipated” in Washington, DC. “With guests arriving from across the country and from around the world,” gala chair Amy Baier said, “we aim to make this as memorable an event for them as we are for these outstanding honorees.” Yet with the Ginsburg family absent, it will be little more than a high-rent farce and an insult to her legacy.
