Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor caught a show in San Juan last summer, and Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny’s label footed the bill—to the tune of $4,333 in free tickets. The reveal hit Monday when Sotomayor’s annual financial disclosure dropped, and it’s raising questions about gift transparency and industry perks flowing to the nation’s highest bench.
Here’s the play-by-play: Rimas Entertainment—the label run by Bad Bunny’s manager Noah Assad—gifted Sotomayor and her guests concert tickets during a private August 2025 trip to Puerto Rico. The tickets’ value landed at $4,333. Bad Bunny was running a weekslong residency at that exact time, and Puerto Rican journalist Jay Fonseca confirmed on his podcast that Sotomayor was expected to be courtside. But here’s where it gets fuzzy: Sotomayor’s disclosure never explicitly names which artist’s show she actually attended. She simply listed it as “Rimas Entertainment is a record company, which provided tickets for a concert for me and guests while I was on a private trip to Puerto Rico in August 2025.” That vagueness? It’s suspicious.
For context, Rimas isn’t just Bad Bunny’s label—it represents a whole roster of Latin music artists. And while nothing illegal happened here, the optics matter. Federal regs allow Supreme Court justices to accept gifts from people without business before the court, and Sotomayor did disclose it properly. But the lack of specificity stands out. When she reported getting $598 from the Coterie Theater in Kansas City for her children’s book musical adaptation right below this entry, she was explicit about which show and which event. This time? Radio silence on the artist. The court’s spokesperson didn’t respond to requests for clarity.
This lands during a moment of heightened scrutiny about SCOTUS gifts and outside income. The same disclosure cycle showed Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pulling $1.2 million in book advances from Penguin Random House, and Justice Gorsuch earning royalties for his books. The justices collectively reported over $2 million in publisher payments. But concert freebies from record labels? That’s a new flavor of entertainment industry access flowing to the bench.
What makes this story hit different: Sotomayor is the first Puerto Rican justice on the Supreme Court. Bad Bunny is one of the planet’s biggest artists and a vocal critic of Trump’s immigration policies. The cultural optics of a liberal justice getting Bunny’s label treatment in PR feels intentional—honoring her roots, celebrating her heritage. But if the culture and the courts are getting cozier, the public deserves to know exactly whose show the justice was checking out. Specificity kills rumors.
The 16BARS take: When a Supreme Court justice gets free tickets worth thousands from an artist’s label, the least they can do is name the artist. Vagueness breeds conspiracy, and the bench can’t afford that noise.
