Baton Rouge Judge Tiffany Foxworth-Roberts' repeated lack of honesty about her military service amounts to "stolen valor," making it necessary that she be removed from the bench, according to a newly released recommendation from Louisiana's Judiciary Commission.
Foxworth-Roberts has been under investigation by the commission for more than a year over allegations that she lied about the rank she attained in the military, the wars she served in and her military duties, which she touted to voters when they elected her as a district judge in 2020. The commission has also investigated whether Foxworth-Roberts reported a false burglary while she was campaigning that same year.
But the Judiciary Commission has now taken an extraordinarily rare step of telling the Louisiana Supreme Court that they should strip Foxworth-Roberts of her judgeship. The state's high court has not removed a judge from office in 16 years.
The last judge to get the boot was Jefferson Parish District Judge Joan Benge in 2009 after she was caught on FBI wiretaps during a corruption investigation into the 24th Judicial District courthouse called "Wrinkled Robe." Benge did not face criminal charges in the case.
Since then, the Judiciary Commission has recommended less harsh sanctions for judges who have been arrested for sexual battery, barked expletives from the bench and abused their power to hold people in contempt of court.
Foxworth-Roberts' behavior, however, rises to a level deserving of the strongest discipline, the Judiciary Commission wrote in court filings. The judge appeared before the commission in May to defend herself, answering questions and arguing that she should be allowed to stay on the bench.
Those explanations "strained the limits of credulity," the commission found.
"She was dishonest and misleading, failed to disclose or provide relevant information, and obfuscated the truth, as demonstrated throughout this recommendation," they wrote.
The Louisiana Supreme Court ultimately has the power to impose discipline and does not have to follow the commission's recommendation. In 2013, for example, the commission recommended that the high court strip the judgeship of Leo Boothe of Catahoula and Concordia parishes.
Boothe was accused of softening the sentence of a drug convict in exchange for receiving incriminating information about a judicial rival. But the Supreme Court instead ordered a one-year suspension without pay.
Ads went 'beyond mere misrepresentations'
In Foxworth-Roberts' case, the commission has seized on campaign advertisements that said she was a veteran of three wars -- Desert Storm, Iraq and Afghanistan -- and attained the rank of captain. But she was just 16 years old during Desert Storm and never reached the level of captain.
While Foxworth-Roberts did serve in the military, she was not deployed overseas, nor did she spend time in a combat role. Instead, she was a medical laboratory assistant who focused on blood grouping, collecting and processing, according to her military records.
"Here, Judge Foxworth-Roberts has gone beyond mere misrepresentations that misled the public: she created a campaign sign falsely stating she was a U.S. Army Captain, she paid for multiple campaign ads that repeated this lie (which also led to endorsements that repeated this lie), she falsely conveyed to voters that she was a combat veteran of three wars, and she lied to a police officer about where her car break-in occurred," the commission wrote.
They also criticized her response to questions about advertisements in which the judge wore military gear, describing herself as "no stranger to being on the front lines during the call of duty."
When commission members asked her about the ads, "she digressed into a long, irrelevant narrative about how she was a victim to criminal activity while campaigning, in which she stated: 'It's hard to be out in the middle of an urban city or an inner city, especially as a female, campaigning and you are constantly being met with danger or criminal activity.'"
The recommendation noted that several members of the Judiciary Commission served in the military, and that they appreciate the roles of other members who work as lab assistants and nurses. But they said they could not understand why Foxworth-Roberts did not promote the service she performed, but instead used misleading words and images that gave the impression she was a combat veteran.
In her testimony, Foxworth-Roberts said that because she treated Gulf War veterans in the early 1990s at Walter Reed Medical Center, she believed she played a supporting role in Desert Storm.
Judge's answers deemed not credible
The commission also found Foxworth-Roberts untruthful about a burglary she reported while campaigning in 2020 in Baton Rouge. She told police it happened in her driveway, but later told her insurance company that it happened miles away when her parked car was broken into as she campaigned.
Foxworth-Roberts estimated that she had $40,000 worth of jewelry and other goods stolen from her car.
"In an apparent attempt to downplay the effect that her failure to disclose the correct burglary location could have had on the police investigation, Judge Foxworth-Roberts also tried to muddle the facts during the hearing and before the commission," they wrote. "She testified that her house was just 'blocks away' from the burglary location, despite earlier testifying and previously acknowledging that the distance was about three miles away."
An attorney for Foxworth-Roberts did not return a message Friday for this story. Foxworth-Roberts' attorneys previously told the Judiciary Commission that while the judge had committed failures in judgment, they were not failures of character.
The commission ruled 11-2 in favor of recommending that Foxworth-Roberts be removed from the bench. They also recommended that she reimburse commission costs of more than $9,000.
The Judiciary Commission cited a California case in which Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Patrick Couwenberg lost his robe. Couwenberg was accused of spreading a pattern of lies about his credentials, including that he was a Vietnam War veteran who received a Purple Heart.
In Benge's case, the Louisiana Supreme Court said that removal of an elected judge must be "not simply to punish an individual judge, but to purge the judiciary of any taint."