The nation’s justices are facing a bizarre new scourge of food delivery pranks they say are designed to intimidate them into not challenging President Donald Trump‘s policies in court.
Federal judges told the Washington Post that pizza orders, possibly numbering in the hundreds, have been sent to the homes of jurists in at least seven states since Trump assumed office for the second time.
The stunts appear to eerily draw upon the 2016 Pizzagate conspiracy theory, an extremist MAGA claiming the existence of a Satanic pedophilia ring in the Democratic Party.
Michelle Childs, a Washington Circuit Judge, told WaPo that she’d received no less than seven anonymous deliveries to her home since the beginning of February, with one arriving not long after she contributed to a ruling against the White House over firings at a government watchdog.
“It’s unsettling because I’d like to go to work every day, even with the hardest case, just feeling like there’s no sense of intimidation,” Childs said, adding, “You need a strong judiciary for the system to work. This is infringing on democracy generally.”
Some of the orders have turned up under the name of New Jersey District Judge Esther Salas’ son, Daniel Anderl—who was shot dead at their family home back in 2020 by a disgruntled attorney disguised as a delivery driver.
“It went from judges getting pizzas, to then judges’ children getting pizzas, to then judges getting pizzas that they didn’t order in my murdered son’s name,” Salas said, further describing the pranks as an act of “psychological warfare.”
With orders in her son’s name turning up at the homes of jurists in D.C., Rhode Island, New York, California, Tennessee, South Carolina, Maryland and Oregon, Salas believes the pranksters are using her son’s death as a warning.
“We know the first is, ‘I know where you live.’ Second is, ‘We know where your children live.’ And the third now is, ‘Do you want to end up like Judge Salas? Do you want to end up like Daniel?’” she said.
Victims of these pranks have reported their experiences to the Marshals Service, which has apparently now begun compiling testimonies and making efforts to track the deliveries.
Although the service reportedly declined to discuss the matter with WaPo in any detail, the Marshals Service for the Southern District of New York is understood to have sent out a cautionary memo to jurists in the area earlier in March. It confirmed that the anonymous deliveries did indeed appear to coincide with victims’ involvement in legal proceedings against the federal government.
