RBG Award organizer cancels ceremony after row over tributes

The organizer behind an honor named after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a lifelong champion of women’s rights and liberal causes, is canceling the awards ceremony scheduled for April after facing blistering criticism from her family and friends of several of the project’s planned recipients year.

Justice Ginsburg helped establish the award in 2019, the year before she died. It was originally intended for “women who exemplify human qualities of empathy and humility,” but four of the five intended recipients this year are men. Among them are Elon Musk, the technology entrepreneur who regularly launches rants at perceived critics; Rupert Murdoch, the tycoon whose empire helped create conservative news media; and Michael R. Milken, the financier who was the face of corporate greed in the 1980s and served nearly two years in prison before becoming a philanthropist.

“The last thing we intended was to offend RBG’s family and friends,” Julie Opperman, president of the Dwight D. Opperman Foundation, which presents the award each year, said in a statement Monday. She added: “The foundation is not interested in creating controversy. It is not interested in generating a debate about whether certain awards are worth it or not.”

Ms. Opperman explained that the reason for including men as recipients this year was to reflect and uphold Justice Ginsburg’s “teachings regarding equality.” The foundation “didn’t think about politics” but focused on selecting leaders who “have made significant contributions to society,” she said.

Before the foundation released the statement, Justice Ginsburg’s children had demanded that their mother’s name be removed from the award, which until this year was called the Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Woman of Leadership Award.

Her daughter, Jane C. Ginsburg, a law professor at Columbia, said the choice of winners this year was “an affront” to the values ​​that justice stood for.

James S. Ginsburg, her son and founder of Cedille Records, a classical music record company, said on CNN over the weekend, celebrating Mr Musk and Mr Murdoch with the judge’s name amounted to “desecration of my mother’s memory”, and he vowed to “fight” the decision.

This year’s intended recipients, which also include businesswoman Martha Stewart and actor Sylvester Stallone, were scheduled to be honored with the renamed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Leadership Award at a gala next month at the Library of Congress. A spokesperson for the Opperman Foundation confirmed on Monday evening that the ceremony had been cancelled, but said no decision had been made on whether those selected would still receive the award. In its statement, the foundation said it would “reconsider its mission” and assess “how and whether to proceed in the future.”

Previous recipients include Queen Elizabeth II, fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg and actress and singer Barbra Streisand.

During the nearly three decades she spent on the court, Justice Ginsburg emerged as a progressive voice, finding herself on the winning side in cases involving abortion, affirmative action, and gender equality. While in the minority, she did some of her most notable work in the field of dissent.

“Judge Ginsburg fought her entire life to fight discrimination in all its many forms, to empower women to control their own destiny, and to create opportunity for people from all walks of life,” said Amanda L. Tyler, one of the judges. former law clerks, who co-authored a book with Justice Ginsburg about the judge’s career and is now a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Any award that bears Justice Ginsburg’s name should honor that great legacy,” she added.