The World's Worstest Lover: "Stalking" Judge Gets 60-Day Suspension, Probation

PHILADELPHIA - Pennsylvania's Court of Judicial Discipline has suspended an Erie County magisterial district justice for 60 days who it previously described as "stalking" five young women.

The suspension, which is without pay but with medical benefits, is significantly less severe than the punishment the Judicial Conduct Board sought for Gerard L. Alonge. It also includes a term of probation for the remainder of his term.

His defense attorney, Philip B. Friedman of Conner Riley Friedman and Weichler in Erie, had petitioned the court for a sanction of probation plus psychiatric treatment, while Joseph A. Massa Jr., chief counsel for the JCB, recommended a removal from bench.

The decision, reached July 20, came less than an hour after Friedman and Massa wrapped up their arguments at a sanctions hearing.

At that hearing, Friedman offered several witnesses who bolstered the defense's claim that Alonge was "socially inept" and suffered from depression and obsessive compulsive disorder.

The court, on July 7, ruled that Alonge had brought the judicial office into disrepute through his interactions with four young female attorneys and a 17-year-old girl who had appeared before him for an underage drinking citation in October 2006.

According to Judge Joseph M. James, the court found that Alonge, who was elected a MDJ in November 2005, had made the young women uncomfortable by his actions.

Alonge called several of those women repeatedly, even after they asked him to stop, the court found, and, in 2007, he also visited one women at her office unannounced and another at her home, uninvited. In that case, Alonge told the women he had been waiting for "several hours" for her to come home and that he had made the trip "to come meet the phenomenal and sensational attorney that he had heard so much about." According to James, he also told the woman, a brunette, that he had been told she had b ...