A federal judge, appointed by former President Barack Obama, has been caught with her pants down. Literally.
U.S. District Judge Eleanor Ross, 58, was caught carrying on a two-year sexual affair with a top Atlanta police commander.
The two Democrats fornicated loudly inside her courthouse chambers during business hours while her law clerks sat within earshot, according to the scandalous new reports.
Ross, judge in the Northern District of Georgia, was publicly identified Thursday by Bloomberg Law at the center of a stunning judicial misconduct report. Her lover was identified as Atlanta Police Department Deputy Chief Kelley Collier, 55, who commands the department’s community services division and has been with APD since 1998.
Ross is married to a DeKalb County judge. The misconduct investigation into the affair was triggered after a law clerk filed a complaint.
The clerk reported that, on multiple occasions, Ross had sex so loudly with a uniformed law enforcement officer in her chambers during work hours that staff could hear it all through the walls. Clerks reported overhearing moaning and kissing sounds. One became so uncomfortable they left work early.
The affair ran from 2023 to 2025. When investigators first confronted Ross, she denied it and blamed a disgruntled clerk. She later admitted to the extramarital relationship during work hours.
A special committee of the Eleventh Circuit Judicial Council, which oversees federal courts in Georgia, Florida and Alabama, concluded Ross “demonstrated a gross lack of judgment” and created “a chambers workplace that was extremely uncomfortable and troubling” for court staff.
As part of her punishment, Ross agreed to give up any future bid to become chief judge, to step back from Judicial Conference committees, and to write personal apology letters to the law clerks affected by her conduct.
The misconduct report also surfaced a separate ethics issue: Ross had attended a partisan political event at a Fulton County District Attorney campaign victory party and got belligerently drunk. She later admitted to investigators she had “consumed too many martinis the night before at the primary election victory party for a District Attorney.”
Atlanta PD announced Thursday it had launched an internal investigation into Collier.
“The Atlanta Police Department has launched an investigation to determine if the person mentioned in the Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability of the Judicial Conference of the United States is indeed an employee of the Atlanta Police Department,” the department said in a statement.
Ross was nominated by Obama during his second term and confirmed by the Senate in 2014.