The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday denied a request from a lawyer who once represented a woman known as the “DC Madam” to release records from her famous escort service.
Those records include such sensitive information as customer names, Social Security numbers and addresses— information the lawyer, Montgomery Blair Sibley, has said could affect the 2016 presidential election. The so-called DC Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey ran a high-priced escort service in the Washington D.C.-area for a number of years before her eventual conviction. She died in 2008.
Sibley wanted the Supreme Court to lift a lower court order, in place since 2007, that bars him from releasing any information about her records.
“Time is of the essence,” Sibley wrote in his latest Supreme Court filing. “Given the significance of the upcoming political primaries and caucuses, in the looming Republican and Democratic conventions on July 18th and July 25th respectively, and given the impact of the presently sealed from the public record that this attorney seeks to release, upon those electoral deliberations, expedited resolution to this application is incumbent upon this court.”
His application was directed to Chief Justice John Roberts, the justice assigned to emergency appeals from the Washington, D.C. area. Roberts denied it without seeking a response from any other party, a sign of how little merit Roberts found in the application.
This article originally appeared NBCNews.com.
