Fire destroys home of South Carolina judge who had received death threats

The cause of a huge fire at the beachfront home of a South Carolina judge who had reportedly been subjected to death threats is being investigated by state law enforcement investigators.

The blaze at the home of Diane Goodstein – a Democrat-appointed circuit court judge – erupted on Saturday, sending three members of her family to the hospital, including her husband, a former state senator.

However, Goodstein, 69, was walking her dogs at the time the blaze erupted at the three-story home in the luxury gated community on Edisto Beach in Colleton county.

A spokesperson for the South Carolina state law enforcement division (Sled) confirmed it was investigating a fire in the county. “The investigation is active and ongoing. More information may be available as the investigation continues,” a Sled spokesperson told FITSNews.

For his part, John Kittredge, the South Carolina chief justice, told the outlet: “At this time, we do not know whether the fire was accidental or arson. Until that determination is made, Sled chief Mark Keel has alerted local law enforcement to provide extra patrols and security.”

Among those treated in hospital after leaping from the home was Goodstein’s husband – former state senator Arnold Goodstein – and their son, Arnold Goodstein II.

Kittredge said the fire appeared to have been caused by an “explosion”, and sources close to Goodstein told the outlet that the judge had received recent death threats.

Goodstein, who has served on the state judicial bench since 1989, in September issued a temporary injunction on the release of the state’s voter files to the Trump administration-led US justice department.

Goodstein’s ruling was later publicly criticized by an assistant attorney general for the justice department’s civil rights division, Harmeet Dhillon. The division has been at the forefront of efforts to acquire information, including names, addresses, driver’s license numbers and social security numbers, of more than 3 million registered voters under an executive order targeting “non-citizen voter registration”.

The state supreme court of South Carolina later reversed Goodstein’s decision.

The cause of the blaze not being immediately known and reports that Goodstein had faced death threats prompted some to question whether the fire at the judge’s home may be the US’s latest example of politically themed violence.

The US’s political establishment has spent recent weeks grappling with the 10 September shooting death of the conservative political activist Charlie Kirk. In June, related shootings killed Melissa Hortman, Minnesota’s former House speaker, and her husband, Mark, while injuring John Hoffman, a Democratic state senator, and his wife, Yvette.

In April, the home of Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, was firebombed.

Meanwhile, before winning a second presidency in November 2024, Trump was the target of two assassination attempts.

Public figures across the political divide have denounced the rise of political violence as anti-democratic – but fears within the judiciary persist that they are now targets.

In May, a bipartisan coalition of more than 150 federal and state judges sent a letter to Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, condemning what they said was “a pattern of retaliatory attacks aimed at intimidating the judiciary”.

Nancy Gertner, a former judge and current professor of practice at Harvard, told the Guardian that “judges are worried about their own safety”.

“There are people who are inflamed by the incendiary comments of our president and members of Congress about judges,” Gertner said. “Public officials have legitimized attacks on judges with whom they disagree.”

But assigning the rise of politically inspired violence to one side of the political divide or other in the US has proved imprecise.

A study published in September by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that there had been “an increase in the number of leftwing terrorism attacks and plots, although such violence has risen from very low levels and remains much lower than historical levels of violence carried out by rightwing and jihadist attackers”.

The authors of the study found that this year “marks the first time in more than 30 years that leftwing terrorist attacks outnumber those from the violent far right”.

It also warned that “despite its decline this year, rightwing terrorism could easily return to previous high levels”.