Under intense pressure from Republican leaders, including Gov. Spencer Cox, Justice Diana Hagen resigned from the Utah Supreme Court on Friday.

Cox, along with House Speaker Mike Schultz and Senate President J. Stuart Adams announced an investigation last month into allegations that Hagen had an improper relationship with an attorney with a case before the high court — accusations that the Judicial Conduct Commission dismissed as “misleading.”

Under the cloud of the investigation — and the Utah Republican Party actively campaigning for Utahns to vote her off the bench in November’s retention election — Hagen submitted her resignation, “effective immediately,” to Cox, the governor said in a news release Friday.

In her resignation letter, Hagen wrote that she recognizes public service requires sacrifice and officials are held to a higher standard and “greater degree of public scrutiny and diminished privacy.”

“But my family and friends did not choose public life,” she wrote. “They do not deserve to have intensely personal details surrounding the painful dissolution of my thirty-year marriage subjected to public scrutiny.”

“I would love nothing more than to continue serving the people of Utah as a Supreme Court Justice,” she wrote, “but I cannot do so without sacrificing the privacy and well-being of those I care about and the effective functioning and independence of Utah’s judiciary.”

Schultz and Adams said in a statement that Hagen’s resignation was “in the best interest” of the court.

“We consider this matter related to Justice Hagen concluded and will not conduct any further investigations related to these specific allegations,” the legislative leaders said.

However, a separate joint statement issued by Cox, Schultz, Adams and Chief Justice Matthew Drurrant, the state leaders said the three branches of government “are committed to working together on potential reforms to the Judicial Conduct Commission — ensuring it upholds the highest standards of accountability and earns the confidence of the people of Utah.”

The chief justice, in his own response, said he was “saddened” that Hagen chose to resign and called her a “valued member of the judiciary.”

He noted her work prosecuting the kidnapper of Elizabeth Smart before joining the courts, work on behalf of crime victims, mentoring young lawyers, and meeting with school groups and members of the public.

“As a Justice, her intellect and abilities are only matched by her kindness and generosity,” Durrant wrote. “This is a loss for the judiciary. But I know that Justice Hagen will continue to lift up others in her future endeavors.”

[READ: Here’s Justice Diana Hagen’s letter resigning from the Utah Supreme Court]

In 2024, Hagen wrote an opinion for the court in a case where the Supreme Court voided an attempt by the Legislature to amend the Utah Constitution to give lawmakers the ability to repeal citizen-passed ballot initiatives.

One of the attorneys in that case was David Reymann. It was Reymann — who is also a plaintiffs’ attorney in the state’s long-running redistricting case — with whom Hagen allegedly had an inappropriate relationship, although the claim was based solely on accusations Hagen’s ex-husband made to an attorney who filed the complaint with the JCC.

The conduct commission did a preliminary investigation and staff reported the allegations were “speculative, overstated, and misleading,” and the bipartisan commissioners voted to dismiss the complaint.

But after the House of Representatives provided the JCC’s report to KSL last month under an open records request, Cox, Schultz and Adams weren’t satisfied, saying unanswered questions remained and called for an independent investigation into the allegations.

Kim Cordova, president of the Utah State Bar, said the lawyers’ group “fully respects and supports her decision, but it is a tremendous loss to Utah’s judiciary.”

“I feel like she was unfairly put in the spotlight for an allegation that had already been properly investigated by the agency that is constitutionally and legally created to handle these types of scenarios and no misconduct was found,” Cordova said.

She said Hagen was “unfairly portrayed in the media” as a result of the release of the confidential JCC probe.

The group Co-Equal, a nonpartisan organization aimed at preserving the independence of the judiciary, said the JCC’s exoneration “should have been the end of it. Instead, a sitting justice was subjected to a coordinated political pressure campaign until she resigned.”

“The message to every judge in Utah is unmistakable: rule against the Legislature, and this is what follows,” the group said in its statement. “That is how judicial independence dies – not through a single dramatic act, but through sustained pressure designed to make the personal cost of impartiality too high to bear.

The JCC is also doing its own investigation into how and why the report, which is confidential under the law, was released. It is a class B misdemeanor for anyone to release records that are classified as private under the law.

The judiciary has been in the crosshairs of the Legislature following a series of defeats Republican legislators have suffered in Utah’s courts.

Earlier this year, legislators voted to add two additional judges to the Supreme Court — a move Republicans said was needed to keep pace with the growth in the state. But critics of the decision, including conservative commentator Glenn Beck, characterized adding new justices as court packing to change the ideological makeup of the court.

Cox has announced a dozen finalists for those two vacancies, all of whom are men. With Hagen’s resignation, there will now be a third appointment.

Hagen was appointed by Cox and confirmed by the Republican-led Senate in 2022. Prior to that, she served five years on the Utah Court of Appeals.

This story is breaking and will be updated.