Family of Ruth Bader Ginsburg Blasts Foundation for Giving Namesake Award to Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk

AP Photo/Patrick Semansky.

The family of Ruth Bader Ginsburg sharply condemned the Dwight D. Opperman Foundation for announcing its plans to give an award named after the late Supreme Court Justice to Elon Musk and Rupert Murdoch.

Ginsburg was 87 when she passed away in 2020 after 27 years on the nation’s highest court. She was the first Jewish woman on the Supreme Court and the second woman overall, after Sandra Day O’Connor. Ginsburg spent her last years on the bench as the senior member of the Court’s liberal wing, becoming a beloved pop culture icon on the left, usually portrayed in one of her favorite lace collars she would wear when issuing one of her spirited dissenting opinions.

According to The Washington Post, Ginsburg was “longtime friends” with Dwight Opperman, who founded the online legal research platform Westlaw and died in 2013. The award in her honor was launched in 2020 as the “Ruth Bader Ginsburg Woman of Leadership Award” to recognize “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.” The justice herself was on hand to honor the first recipient, Agnes Gund, a philanthropist and patron of the arts. Other honorees include Barbra Streisand, Queen Elizabeth II, and Diane von Furstenberg.

News broke this week that the foundation planned to give its “Ruth Bader Ginsburg Leadership Award” to five people: Musk, Murdoch, Martha Stewart, Michael Milken, and Sylvester Stallone. For four of the five recipients to be men for an award named after the Justice whose legal career included winning numerous landmark gender discrimination cases raised eyebrows, but it was the selection of billionaires Musk and Murdoch that seems to have drawn the most ire.

Critics of the selection of the awardees noted on Musk’s troubled stewardship of The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter — including a proliferation of antisemitic and other hateful content — and Murdoch’s management of media outlets like Fox News, where on-air personalities and guests frequently advocate for positions in opposition to Ginsburg’s own views. Several media reports have reported that Opperman’s widow, Julie Opperman, has donated significant sums to GOP candidates.

Both members of Ginsburg’s family and several of her former law clerks have spoken out to criticize this year’s awardees, issuing statements that do not specific any names but are broadly being viewed as reacting to the selection of Musk and Murdoch.

One former Ginsburg clerk, New York University law professor Trevor Morrison, sent a letter to Julie Opperman expressing that he was “appalled” to hear the news of who would receive this year’s awards, because despite the “notable success in their careers” each of the awardees had achieved, “the decision to bestow upon them the particular honor of the RBG Award is a striking betrayal of the Justice’s legacy”:

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.

Morrison told Mother Jones that the Opperman Foundation had not consulted the Ginsburg family about the award recipients, and added in his letter that the late Justice’s two children, Jane Ginsburg 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.”

The Ginsburg children and grandchildren released their own statement, writing that the family ”fully supports the sentiments expressed” in Morrison’s letter, and expressing a similar dismay over the conflict between the awardees and Ginsburg’s legacy:

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.

Efforts by various media outlets to get comment from the Opperman Foundation responding to the opposition from Ginsburg’s family and former law clerks have been thus far unsuccessful, other than statements like that from foundation president Matthew Umhofer, who told The Washington Post that “the RBG Award celebrates the achievements of individuals in their chosen fields without regard to politics.”