In what appear to be the first public comments made by a member of the Colorado Supreme Court addressing its 2023 decision to remove Donald Trump from the state’s primary ballot, Justice Melissa Hart on Friday said that threats and retribution against judges “can’t continue.”

“My house was swatted. I had nine guns pointed at me by the Denver Police Department. It was the scariest night of my life,” said Hart, speaking in Colorado Springs at the Bench & Bar Conference of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit.

Previous reporting acknowledged members of the state Supreme Court faced a flood of threats after becoming the first court to deem Trump constitutionally ineligible to seek the presidency for engaging in insurrection. KDVR reported that a “metro-area police department” responded to one justice’s home for an “unfounded threat,” but did not name the justice or the jurisdiction.

The Denver Police Department confirmed to Colorado Politics that officers entered Hart’s home “in an emergent manner with guns drawn” as a result of “swatting” — which is the act of falsely reporting an emergency to generate a police response.

Hart’s comments came as she moderated a panel at the 10th Circuit conference about the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent term, during which it reversed the Colorado Supreme Court’s disqualification decision in the case known as Trump v. Anderson.

The dispute originated in Colorado after four Republican and two unaffiliated voters petitioned to force Secretary of State Jena Griswold to bar Trump from the ballot using state elections law. The petitioners alleged Trump was ineligible to hold office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which disqualifies senators, U.S. representatives and “an officer of the United States,” among others, from holding future office if they took an oath to support the Constitution and subsequently “engaged in insurrection.”

A Denver trial judge stopped short of declaring Trump ineligible, notwithstanding his actions leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Then in December, the state Supreme Court, by 4-3, deemed Trump disqualified under Section 3. The U.S. Supreme Court quickly reversed the ruling, believing individual states lacked the authority to remove presidential candidates from their ballots.

“It should not get lost that the six people came into court and sued Trump and that’s extraordinary they could do that. And it’s extraordinarily dangerous that they could do that,” said Hart, who joined the four-justice majority in the unsigned opinion disqualifying Trump. “The consequences of writing the decision in Anderson v. Trump were that my life was threatened, my children’s lives were threatened.”

Hart elaborated that her husband, who works for the U.S. Department of Justice, “fears he will lose his job depending on the new administration. Judges live in fear.”

Alongside Hart on the panel was Eric Olson, one of the attorneys who represented the Colorado voters challenging Trump’s eligibility. He found a “strong inconsistency” between the U.S. Supreme Court’s worry that states would unevenly disqualify candidates if given the power and the court’s decisions empowering a patchwork of regulations in other contexts.

“At the end of the day, six regular Coloradans walked into court and sued the former president and nowhere at any point did any judge or justice say we weren’t allowed to do that,” Olson said. “Even the people we didn’t convince along the way addressed our claims with respect and thoughtfulness. … It shows what is best about our judicial system that we allowed these disputes to occur.”

Alluding to the U.S. Supreme Court’s concerns, Hart said the “reason to fear” Republican-led states might disqualify a Democratic presidential candidate or Democratic-led states would disqualify a Republican “is because our country has become so divided.”

“And local prosecutors would prosecute this or prosecute that depending on their political views, not depending on any legal definitions,” she said, before suggesting violent backlash may have weighed on the minds of the court’s members.

“We live in a time right now that is disturbingly divided and disturbingly violent. And this can’t continue,” Hart said. “I don’t know what we do about it. Maybe the justices’ decisions in this case were influenced by a fear of that. I think that’s an interesting thought. But this just can’t continue.”

She added that the trial judge who oversaw the case and ultimately declined to disqualify Trump “still gets death threats on a regular basis.”

Reuters reported this year that judges who have handled criminal and civil cases involving Trump, and those cases of his supporters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, have received death threats, racist slurs and even personal criticism by Trump himself.

Hart’s statements appear to be the only direct commentary on the disqualification case by a member of the Colorado Supreme Court. At a legal event in May, then-Chief Justice Brian D. Boatright said his first assumption when he learned about a Jan. 2 break-in at the Ralph L. Carr Colorado Judicial Center was that it “had a bearing on the Trump case.” There is no apparent connection between the two events.

The 10th Circuit conference at The Broadmoor resort will continue through Saturday.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect the Denver Police Department’s confirmation of Hart’s statements.