Last year, the Supreme Court justices received free concert tickets, money tied to lucrative book deals, and supplemental income from teaching jobs, according to a Washington Examiner review of the high court’s 2025 financial disclosure reports released on Monday.All but Justice Samuel Alito, who requested a deadline extension for the 15th consecutive year, filed their annual disclosures on time.Justice Sonia Sotomayor accepted free concert tickets for herself and guests valued at $4,333 from Rimas Entertainment, the record label representing Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny.
Sources told Puerto Rican journalist Jay Fonseca last year that Sotomayor would be attending Bad Bunny’s sold-out summer concert series in San Juan, Puerto Rico.“It’s an excellent initiative by both Bad Bunny and the company he runs with his business partners,” said a guest appearing on Fonseca’s podcast, according to an English translation. “I think that even if you aren’t a fan of Justice Sotomayor, it’s an excellent opportunity, an honor, and a privilege to have her attend a concert of that magnitude.”The podcast guest celebrated Sotomayor’s Puerto Rican roots, praising that a figure of “national importance, regardless of what anyone says, decided to share her time here at a concert in Puerto Rico that many Puerto Ricans enjoy.”Sotomayor’s attendance was not widely reported at the time in the U.S., nor did she publicly announce her appearance.It is unclear why Sotomayor did not specify that the tickets, simply listed as a gift of Rimas Entertainment on her disclosure form, were to see Bad Bunny in concert. Sotomayor wrote in the disclosure’s appendix, “Rimas Entertainment is a record company, which provided tickets for a concert for me and guests while I was on a private trip to Puerto Rico in August 2025.”In contrast, Sotomayor reported in an entry directly below the vague ticket listing that she was given $598 from the Coterie Theater in Kansas City, Missouri, and explicitly stated in the gift’s description that the travel funds were so that Sotomayor could attend the opening night of Just Ask! Be Different, Be Brave, Be You, the musical adaptation of her children’s book.Bad Bunny, a vocal critic of President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, generated controversy in the lead-up to his Spanish-only performance at the Super Bowl halftime show this year. Conservatives argued that Bad Bunny intended to stir anti-American sentiments over the Trump administration’s mass deportation operations, while supporters saw Bad Bunny’s appearance as a form of “resistance to U.S. imperialism.”Ketanji Brown Jackson’s $1.18 million book advance
