A fight over the Utah Supreme Court has turned exceptionally ugly.
A fight over the Utah Supreme Court has turned exceptionally ugly.
W e’re all but numb by now to shenanigans and political hardball of every kind in redistricting battles, with the rough-knuckle gerrymandering ethos of Illinois politics having escaped the lab and gone national. We’ve also seen our share of clashes between the political branches and the judiciary. But if there’s one place in America we still associate with earnest good government, it’s Utah. Still, even the Beehive State isn’t immune to the dynamics of one-party dominated states, in which the ruling party gets arrogant and bends the rules to its will while the minority party goes mad. Now, the statehouse in Salt Lake City is buzzing over an unusually salacious accusation that got dropped into the middle of a multi-front war over Utah’s Supreme Court.
An Un-Republican Court
The background is a power struggle between Utah’s Republican-controlled legislature and the state Supreme Court. All five of the court’s current members were appointed by Republican governors (unsurprisingly, given that Utah hasn’t elected a Democratic governor in 46 years), but under a “Missouri plan” system in which the governor is compelled to choose only from a list selected by a “nonpartisan” judicial nominating commission composed of members of the bar. Those members, in turn, are appointed by the governor. The justices stand periodically for “nonpartisan” retention elections.
Given Utah’s long-running Republican government, governors who care about the judiciary should be able to use their two levels of appointment power to act through this system, but that has often not been what happens in Missouri plan systems. The result, in Utah, is a bench that is well to the left of the state’s elected government. The four justices appointed before 2025 all clerked for Democratic-appointed federal judges.
One sign of how far the court has drifted: In 2024, in a post-Dobbs ruling in Planned Parenthood v. Utah, the court stayed Utah’s abortion ban on the grounds that the Utah constitution, adopted in 1895, protects an unenumerated right to “bodily integrity” that need not be rooted in history and tradition, and that an abortion ban could violate the constitutional guarantee that “both male and female citizens of this State shall enjoy equally all civil, political and religious rights and privileges.” (The chief justice dissented solely on the grounds that Planned Parenthood lacked standing.)
Also in 2024, in League of Women Voters v. Utah State Legislature, the same court ruled against the legislature’s effort to remove a ban on partisan gerrymandering from a 2018-passed proposition that created an independent redistricting commission for Utah. That opinion, like the abortion opinion, was joined by Justice Diana Hagen, who is now in the legislature’s crosshairs. In a subsequent opinion for the court in the case, Hagen blasted the legislature for misleading the voters in its own proposed ballot initiative. The decision faced a torrent of criticism from outraged legislators for breaking with precedent and overstepping the court’s authority.
In subsequent rulings — in which Hagen recused herself, for reasons we’ll get to in a bit — the court has sided with Democrats, in February declining to overturn a state trial judge’s decision requiring the legislature to create a single district in Salt Lake County that will likely add a new Democratic seat to the state’s currently all-Republican House delegation. This is yet another of the ways in which Democrats have used litigation to create mid-decade redistricting in their favor in Republican-controlled states. Meanwhile, Republicans just failed to get enough signatures to put the repeal of the 2018 proposition back on the 2026 ballot.
The state’s school choice legislation has also faced hostile rulings from Utah’s lower courts in teachers’ union–brought litigation that has yet to reach the state supreme court.
Law and Lawmakers
The political branches have fought back on multiple fronts. In October 2025, Governor Spencer Cox filled a vacancy on the court with John Nielsen, who had been on the lower court bench only a year. Nielsen, a former law partner of Mike Lee’s brother (himself a former justice of the Utah Supreme Court), defended Utah’s ban on transgender males in women’s sports and described his philosophy as “textualist” and “originalist.”
In February, in a bill passed with supermajority support and signed into law by Cox, Utah expanded the state supreme court from five justices to seven, and its court of appeal from seven to nine. Process justifications were advanced: Utah has been one of only 15 states with a five-member highest court, and legislators have complained that the court is too slow, deciding only 66 cases in written opinions in a two-year period in 2022–23. The court disputes the charge of inefficiency. But nobody has any illusions that ideological differences played a big role in the court expansion, which gives Cox the immediate ability to appoint two new justices. A list of the nominating commission’s choices was released on Thursday.
That may not be quite the same sort of court-packing we fear in the case of the United States Supreme Court, given that the Utah Supreme Court is playing catch-up to the size of a typical state supreme court and that elected judges and other features of political control are more common in state court systems (which, after all, ultimately answer on federal questions to the independent federal judiciary). But it’s absolutely a political effort to change the court’s direction by political force. A better plan would simply have been to let the governors appoint the judges directly in the first place, as happens in the federal system, thus creating someone democratically accountable for the choice of judges.
The legislature has also pursued jurisdiction-stripping, creating a three-judge “constitutional court” to hear civil challenges against the state. The Supreme Court will decide whether that violates its own powers under the state constitution.
On top of that, Utah Republicans are campaigning to get Hagen and her fellow justice Jill Pohlman defeated in retention elections this fall. On Thursday, Cox — who appointed both of them, but now says that he’s serious about putting originalists on the court — defended that step, telling the Deseret News: “This is how the system should work. If people don’t like decisions that are coming out of our Supreme Court . . . the appropriate way to deal with that is to vote against those judges in a retention election.”
Wait, Where’s the Sex Part?
In the midst of all of this, the news broke in mid-April that a complaint was filed against Hagen with the Utah Judicial Conduct Commission:
The complaint . . . came from a Provo-based attorney who said Hagen’s ex-husband told him the justice had exchanged “inappropriate” text messages with David Reymann, one of the attorneys involved in a case about redistricting, which led to Utah getting a new congressional map. Hagen strongly denies allegations of an inappropriate relationship of any kind. Reymann also called the allegations “false.” . . .
The allegations originally come from Hagen’s ex-husband, Tobin Hagen, who said he suspected the justice began having an inappropriate relationship with Reymann . . . including allegations that Diana Hagen had exchanged text messages with Reymann, which Tobin Hagen said began as “silly” and then became “more suggestive.”
Per local media reports, one of those texts included Hagen writing, “My perfect evening would be watching a funny movie with you, listening to you play the guitar, and listen to your favorite song together.” The texts also allegedly featured “repeated use of the ‘kissy face emoji’ and ‘love emoji.’”
Hagen responded to the complaint under oath:
Hagen, in a sworn affidavit to the commission, said she and Reymann met in 1999 when they joined the same law firm, but rarely interacted once she became a judge. In November 2024, the Hagens attended a party at Reymann’s house and the following month they sat near each other at a Salt Lake County Bar Association holiday event.
In March of 2025, Hagen said, she met Reymann one-on-one for the first time in years, a month before she and her husband separated. She filed for divorce that August and said she disclosed to her colleagues on the bench that her husband was accusing her of an affair to hurt her reputation.
Hagen has recused herself from Reymann’s cases in the redistricting litigation since the spring of 2025.
The bipartisan Judicial Conduct Commission concluded that the claims against Hagen were “speculative, overstated, and misleading” and had “very little credibility.” The court also came out swinging against the disclosure, which TV station KSL claimed to have obtained from a public records request:
Despite their protected status, records of the Judicial Conduct Commission were inappropriately released to the public. The Judiciary does not have access to those records and did not release them. The Judicial Conduct Commission has indicated that they did not release them. The inappropriate release of these materials prompted renewed questioning about allegations that were previously investigated and dismissed in accordance with the process established by the Utah Constitution.
There are reasons to doubt that there is a major scandal here. The allegations arose in a contested divorce, and were made to the Judicial Conduct Commission secondhand not by Hagen’s ex-husband but by “Michael Worley — who previously applied for a clerkship for Hagen but ultimately didn’t accept to instead work for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights.” The allegedly incriminating texts were described by Worley, but not produced: “Tobin Hagen . . . declined to share copies of the text messages due to a non-disparagement agreement that was signed as part of their divorce. . . .” That suggests that the Judicial Conduct Commission had little choice but to prefer the sworn denials by Judge Hagen over hearsay and documents it couldn’t review.
In fact, given that Hagen has recused herself from the redistricting litigation for well over a year, there’s not even a real legal scandal here unless she has lied about the timeline — and it’s not clear that Worley has alleged that she did.
Legislators, whether through suspicion that the bench is closing ranks, concern that evidence hasn’t been fully explored, or simple cynical desire to smear Judge Hagen, are now demanding an independent investigation. Cox agrees, but warned in a Thursday press conference that “what would be bad for the Legislature is to have this look just like a witch hunt. That’s not good for the Legislature and it’s not good for the judiciary.”
If we can safely conclude anything, it’s that nobody has come out of this mess looking particularly good.