By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Supreme Court Judge and Princeton alumna Sonia Sotomayor told a Princeton University audience Saturday that she had considered ending her bid to join the high court in 2009 amid a series of news stories questioning her intelligence and portraying her as “abrasive.”, Sotomayor, addressing a Latino alumni conference, shared that detail of her nomination en route to becoming the first Latina and only third woman ever to serve on the nation’s highest court., “There were reports that I wasn’t smart enough, and there were reports that I was abrasive and not nice. Lots of negative stuff was said about me,” she said inside Richardson Auditorium to a packed house. “And it was incredibly, incredibly painful. It hurt.”, She admitted the coverage got to her, “playing on my head” and her “self-confidence.”, “And I actually, seriously thought about pulling out of the process,” she said. “It had gotten to the point where I was just down.”, She recalled telling a friend that ‘If this process is going to result in my getting to the Supreme Court a diminished person, is it worth it?’ And I thought, not to me.”, She said she had shared her feelings with friends, who gave her a dose of “tough love” and told her “to stop wallowing in my self-pity.”, From that experience, she said she took the lesson that there is “no challenge we can do on our own.”, During a roughly 90-minute-appearance, Sotomayor wove in anecdotes of growing up in the Bronx, coming to Princeton in the 1970s and serving on the high court. She spoke in a conversation-style format with fellow alumna, Margarita Rosa, an attorney who is a current university trustee, who was seated next to Sotomayor on the stage of the auditorium. At times, she sprinkled in some Spanish with her remarks, later stepping down from the stage to answer questions from the audience and pose for pictures., The justice avoided discussing pending cases before the court or about high-profile issues nationally. She briefly touched on the 2016 presidential race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton., “I think that there is a glass ceiling that is … higher for women than it is for minorities,” she said “We didn’t get a woman elected, all right. Now, I’m not saying that she should’ve been or not. I’m just saying that we didn’t, OK.”, Sotomayor, 62, graduated from Princeton in 1976 and then went to Yale Law School. Her career in the law included stops at the New York County District Attorney’s Office as a prosecutor, private practice and then the federal bench beginning in 1992., The culmination of that came in 2009, when former President Barack Obama nominated her to the high court to replace David Souter.
