For more than twenty years, Antonia Pia Cipollone has been the backbone of the Grievance Committee for the Ninth Judicial District. She has appeared in published Appellate Division decisions under three separate Chief Counsels. She has investigated hundreds of attorney complaints. She has prosecuted disciplinary proceedings before the courts of the Second Department. She has been, by any objective professional measure, the single most experienced, most tenured, and most institutionally capable attorney in that office.
She has never been made Chief Counsel.
Instead, the Appellate Division, Second Department — the court that controls the Ninth District's attorney discipline apparatus — passed over Cipollone not once, but multiple times. First in favor of an acting appointment. Then in favor of a 2011 bar admittee with an administrative OCA background who, according to sources with direct knowledge of the office, does not have the experience to do the job and has created a culture so toxic that staff are reportedly afraid.
And now, it appears, Antonia Cipollone is not staying silent. She is just staying silent in the wrong direction.
I. The Résumé That Should Have Won
The public record on Antonia Pia Cipollone is, unlike that of her current supervisor, substantial.
Cipollone was admitted to the New York bar in 1995 — a full sixteen years before Courtny Osterling. She graduated from Pace University School of Law and registered immediately with the New York State Grievance Committee at 399 Knollwood Road, Suite 200, White Plains, New York — the address she has called professional home ever since. Her OCA registration number is 2685139. Her phone extension at the committee, (914) 824-5060, is a direct line that grievance defense lawyers across the Hudson Valley have known for two decades.
Her name appears in published Appellate Division disciplinary decisions going back to at least 2004 — the year she appeared as counsel in Matter of Filenbaum, 5 A.D.3d 30 (2d Dep't 2004), alongside then-Chief Counsel Gary L. Casella. She continued appearing in published decisions through the Casella era, into the tenure of Acting Chief Counsel Diana Maxfield Kearse, and continues to appear in decisions under Osterling's name as recently as December 2024.
Let that timeline speak for itself: Antonia Cipollone has been doing this work — successfully, continuously, in published proceedings before New York's appellate courts — for over twenty years. She has outlasted Chief Counsels. She has provided continuity through every leadership transition. She is the person defense lawyers call when they need to understand the office. She is the institutional memory, the procedural compass, and by all accounts the professional soul of the 9th Judicial District's disciplinary function.
And she has been passed over — repeatedly, apparently without public explanation — in favor of people with a fraction of her experience.
II. The Leadership Succession That Made No Sense
When Gary Casella — the longtime Chief Counsel who led the 9th District's grievance operation for decades — eventually departed, the office did not promote Cipollone. Instead, it installed Diana Maxfield Kearse as Acting Chief Counsel — not even a permanent appointment. Kearse served in that acting capacity through at least 2022, with Cipollone continuing as staff counsel beneath her.
Then came Osterling.
Courtny John Osterling was admitted to the New York bar in 2011. He graduated from Syracuse University College of Law. His registration history shows him employed at the Office of Court Administration in Brooklyn — at 330 Jay Street, and later 1 Pierrepont Plaza — through approximately 2022. He then appeared as Chief Counsel of the Ninth Judicial District Grievance Committee. The public record contains no announcement of his appointment, no competitive selection process, no explanation of his qualifications.
He was 14 years out of law school. He had no visible background in grievance committee work. He had never appeared as lead counsel in a published Appellate Division disciplinary proceeding. He went from an OCA administrative role to leading one of the most consequential disciplinary bodies in New York State.
Antonia Cipollone — 30 years at the bar, 20+ years prosecuting cases before the Appellate Division, institutional memory of three leadership regimes — continued as staff counsel beneath him.
The question this raises is not merely one of fairness. It is a question of institutional competence. Why would the Appellate Division, Second Department, or the Office of Court Administration, repeatedly pass over its most experienced internal candidate in favor of people with less relevant experience? What criteria are being applied? And who is making these decisions?
No one in the public administration chain of the 9th Judicial District has offered any public answer to these questions. None has been demanded — until now.
III. "Everyone Is Afraid": The Culture Osterling Has Built
According to multiple sources with direct knowledge of internal operations at the Ninth Judicial District Grievance Committee, the situation inside the office has deteriorated significantly under Osterling's leadership. Cipollone has reportedly told grievance defense lawyers — attorneys who represent respondents in disciplinary proceedings before the committee — that everyone in the office is afraid.
Let the weight of that characterization land. This is not a complaint about management style. This is not a grievance about office politics. This is a senior institutional attorney describing the internal culture of a government body that holds the power to end lawyers' careers — as one defined by fear.
When fear is the operative culture inside a disciplinary office, everything downstream is compromised. Investigators who are afraid of their supervisor do not exercise independent professional judgment — they look for signals about what outcomes the leadership prefers. Staff attorneys who fear retaliation do not push back on charging decisions they believe are wrong. Cases that should be closed get kept open. Cases that should be pursued get buried. The meticulous, dispassionate professional judgment that disciplinary work demands becomes hostage to whoever controls the room.
Cipollone has also reportedly characterized Osterling as attempting to change things in the office in ways that she regards as harmful to its functioning. The specifics of those changes are not yet fully documented in the public record. But the pattern — a new administrator with limited relevant experience imposing operational changes on an institution whose workings he does not fully understand — is one with predictable consequences for every attorney and complainant who comes before the committee.
The attorneys in the Hudson Valley who practice before the 9th District's grievance committee are not abstract constituencies. They are the lawyers who represent clients in Westchester, Rockland, Orange, Putnam, and Dutchess counties. Their ability to do their jobs without fear of arbitrary or politically influenced disciplinary action is a direct component of their clients' access to justice. When the disciplinary office is compromised, the damage does not stop at 399 Knollwood Road.
IV. Whispering to Defense Lawyers Instead of Speaking to the Public
Here is where this story becomes more complicated — and where Antonia Cipollone herself must answer a hard question.
The sources through whom her concerns have reached The Ethics Reporter are grievance defense lawyers. These are the attorneys who represent respondents — the lawyers being investigated or charged by the committee where Cipollone works. Cipollone has apparently disclosed her concerns about Osterling's competence and the office's culture of fear to the attorneys who appear on the other side of her cases.
This is a problem on multiple levels.
First, it places defense lawyers in a profoundly awkward position. They are advocates for their clients — respondent attorneys who face career-ending disciplinary charges prosecuted by the office Cipollone serves. When the staff counsel who helps prosecute those cases tells them, in confidence, that the Chief Counsel is incompetent and the office is running on fear, what are those defense lawyers supposed to do with that information? They cannot use it in a proceeding. They cannot disclose it without burning a source. They are left holding institutional intelligence that benefits no one — least of all their clients.
Second, and more fundamentally: this is not how a public servant discharges her public obligation.
Antonia Cipollone is not an employee of Courtny Osterling. She is an employee of the State of New York. Her salary is paid by New York's taxpayers. Her authority to investigate and prosecute attorney misconduct derives entirely from a public mandate to serve the public interest. The chair she sits in, the files she reviews, the proceedings she conducts — all of it exists because the people of New York have decided that the legal profession should be accountable to the public through a formal disciplinary apparatus.
That apparatus is, according to Cipollone's own reported statements, being mismanaged. The public has a right to know that. The bar has a right to know that. The attorneys whose careers are subject to the committee's authority have a right to know that.
Cipollone's choice to disclose her concerns in confidence to defense lawyers — rather than through any of the institutional channels available to a concerned public employee — does not serve the public. It serves the appearance of loyalty to an institution she privately believes is failing. It is the bureaucratic equivalent of a fireman telling a neighbor that the department has stopped maintaining its equipment, but asking the neighbor not to tell anyone.
New York State law provides multiple avenues for a public employee who has concerns about the integrity of a government office. The Inspector General of the New York State Office of Court Administration has jurisdiction over the court system's staff. The Appellate Division, Second Department, has supervisory authority over the committee's operations. The State Legislature's Judiciary Committee has oversight authority. The press — which exists precisely to transmit information that powerful institutions prefer to suppress — is constitutionally protected as an avenue for exactly this kind of disclosure.
Antonia Cipollone has, apparently, used none of these. She has spoken to defense lawyers and called it done.
It is not done. The public is still waiting.
V. The Yellen Problem Osterling Won't Touch
Into this already troubled picture, add one more dimension: Susan G. Yellen remains the Chair of the Grievance Committee for the Ninth Judicial District.
The Ethics Reporter has documented Yellen's profound conflict of interest in reporting published since January 2026. Yellen is the law partner of Amy M. Eisenberg. Eisenberg was directly identified in the formal judicial conduct charges against Justice Sherri L. Eisenpress — charges that led to Eisenpress's resignation, effective April 28, 2026. The Eisenpress scandal involved a documented social network of matrimonial attorneys who maintained improper relationships with the Justice: joint vacations to the Dominican Republic and Mexico, a group text chain containing gossip and sexually explicit content, and the systematic exchange of judicial confidences that gave favored attorneys a structural advantage in cases before her court.
Eisenberg was in that circle. Yellen is Eisenberg's law partner. And Yellen continues to chair the disciplinary body that is supposed to be the ethical conscience of the legal profession in the Ninth Judicial District.
Osterling is the Chief Counsel of that committee. He has said nothing publicly about the Yellen conflict. He has done nothing visible to address it. Whether this is because he lacks the experience to recognize the problem, lacks the institutional authority to confront it, or has made a calculation that confronting it is too politically costly — none of those explanations reflect well on the leadership of an office whose entire purpose is ethical accountability.
Meanwhile, Cipollone — who has watched this institution for over two decades and knows its history, its cases, and its obligations better than anyone — has reportedly communicated her concerns about Osterling's competence to defense lawyers while the Yellen conflict quietly festers above both of them.
VI. "Don't Appeal" — The Chilling Effect on the Appellate Process
The dysfunction at the committee level does not exist in isolation. It exists within a larger appellate structure that has, according to grievance defense lawyers across the 9th District, produced one of the most toxic informal advisories in New York legal practice: don't appeal your disciplinary outcome from the 9th District, because the Appellate Division, Second Department, is harder on respondent attorneys than the committee itself.
This is not a rumor. It is the documented, formal advice that experienced grievance defense counsel routinely give their clients. The Appellate Division, Second Department — the court that reviews disciplinary decisions from the Ninth Judicial District — conducts de novo review and is not bound by the sanctions recommended by the hearing panel or the committee. It has, in published decisions, imposed suspensions where censure was recommended. It has extended suspensions beyond what the committee sought. The risk of appealing a disciplinary outcome, in this system, is that you might receive something worse than what you were trying to challenge.
The practical effect is a complete collapse of meaningful appellate review for 9th District disciplinary respondents. The right to appeal exists in law. In practice, attorneys who have been disciplined — many of them unjustly, in proceedings conducted by an office whose own staff privately doubts its leadership — are told by their lawyers: don't. The cost is too high. The risk is too real.
This is not a functioning disciplinary system. This is a system that has weaponized the appellate process against the very attorneys it is supposed to discipline fairly. And it is a system operating under leadership that, by the account of its own most experienced staff attorney, does not command respect and has created a culture of fear.
VII. The Democracy Deficit
Step back and look at what the Ninth Judicial District's grievance apparatus actually is right now:
- A Chief Counsel with no relevant disciplinary experience, appointed without public process or explanation, who has created an internal culture of fear.
- A Chair whose law partner vacationed with a now-disgraced judge and who has not been removed despite documented conflicts of interest and months of public reporting demanding accountability.
- A veteran staff attorney with 30 years of experience and two decades of institutional service who has been passed over for leadership multiple times and is now disclosing concerns about the office's management — to defense lawyers, in confidence, rather than to the public that employs her.
- An appellate review process so tilted toward severity that experienced defense lawyers routinely advise respondent attorneys not to exercise their right to appeal.
This is not a description of a functional government institution. This is a description of a disciplinary apparatus that has, through a combination of bad appointments, unaddressed conflicts, institutional silence, and a chilling appellate environment, become effectively unaccountable to the public it ostensibly serves.
The attorneys subject to its jurisdiction — thousands of licensed practitioners in Westchester, Rockland, Orange, Putnam, and Dutchess counties — have no meaningful recourse when the institution itself is compromised. They cannot easily challenge the leadership. They cannot compel Cipollone to speak publicly. They cannot force Yellen to recuse or resign. They cannot make the Appellate Division, Second Department, adopt an anti-escalation rule that would make appeals less dangerous. They are, as the practitioners in this space describe it, in a democracy — or rather, a profound absence of one.
VIII. What Antonia Cipollone Owes the Public
This publication has great respect for the career that Antonia Cipollone has built. Twenty years of disciplinary work is not easy. It requires precision, professional courage, and genuine commitment to the institution's purpose. She has prosecuted difficult cases. She has maintained her professional standing through multiple leadership changes. She has been the continuity that a functioning disciplinary office requires.
But none of that history absolves her of her current obligation.
She knows this office. She knows its history. She knows its cases, its personnel, its culture under good leadership and bad. She has a firsthand view of what is happening under Osterling's tenure that no outside observer can replicate. And by the account of multiple sources, she has a clear professional assessment: the office is being run by someone who lacks the experience for the job, in an atmosphere of fear, with a Chair who has no business sitting at the head of the table.
That assessment belongs to the public. Not to defense lawyers in off-the-record conversations. Not to colleagues in private commiseration. To the public — through the Office of Court Administration's Inspector General, through the Appellate Division's supervisory authority, through the Legislature, through the press.
Antonia Cipollone is a public servant. The people of the State of New York — not her supervisor's organizational chart — define her obligations. She has every legal protection available to a state employee who reports concerns about institutional dysfunction through appropriate channels. New York's whistleblower statutes protect public employees who disclose information to the appropriate authority in good faith. She is not powerless. She is choosing, apparently, not to use the power she has.
We are asking her, directly and publicly, to reconsider that choice.
The attorneys whose careers pass through 399 Knollwood Road deserve a disciplinary office led by someone qualified to lead it. The public deserves a committee chair who is not compromised by her law partner's association with a disgraced judge. And Antonia Cipollone — the woman who apparently knows all of this better than anyone — owes the people she serves more than whispers.
Her voice, in the right forum, could matter. The question is whether she will use it.