Police responded Wednesday evening to a swatting call at the Virginia residence of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, according to Fairfax County police, in an incident that came as she was back on the bench Thursday morning reading summaries of two opinions she wrote. Officers received the report just after 9 p.m. ET through the department’s nonemergency line, then coordinated with Supreme Court Police personnel assigned to the home and determined the claim was fictitious.
Fairfax County police said no additional resources were sent to the scene. A dispatcher said the caller identified themselves as a neighbor and reported hearing gunshots at an address tied to Barrett in Fairfax County, but there was no answer when the number was called back and it was not immediately clear whether the report was a swatting attempt.
The call lands in a climate of persistent threats aimed at judges and justices, where false emergency reports can be used to trigger a heavier police response at a private home. Barrett, who was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Donald Trump in 2020, has already been touched by that pressure before: in March 2025, her sister Amanda Coney Williams was the target of a bomb threat at her home in Charleston, South Carolina.
Swatting is a tactic that uses fabricated claims of crimes such as murder, hostage situations, bomb threats or active shooters to draw police to a location, often with dangerous consequences for the person inside. The threat environment around the court has remained sharp since 2022, when protests followed the leaked draft opinion in Dobbs and Justice Brett Kavanaugh was later found near his home by a man charged with attempted murder. That case ended in October with a sentence of eight years in prison after the woman pleaded guilty to trying to assassinate him.
The broader pattern is not hypothetical. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his 2024 annual report that threats against judges had tripled over the previous decade, and the U.S. Marshals Service reported 564 threats against judges in fiscal year 2025. A senior Republican senator said swatting is “an attempt to get an innocent person killed,” and argued that the proper response is to put the offender in prison for many years.
By Thursday morning, Barrett had returned to ordinary court business, saying nothing about the previous night’s incident as she read aloud summaries of two opinions she authored. That silence did not make the call less serious; it made the point sharper. The system treated the report as false before it could escalate, but the fact that it reached the home of a sitting justice in the first place shows how quickly a hoax can turn into a federal security problem.
