HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) -- A Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice said Friday that a colleague at the center of a pornographic email scandal tried to coerce him into taking his side against the chief justice, saying he "was not going down alone." Justice J. Michael Eakin said Justice Seamus McCaffery had threatened to leak "inappropriate" emails Eakin had received at a private email account if he did not take up McCaffery's cause against Chief Justice Ronald Castille. Eakin refused, and hours later a reporter approached him asking about a packet of "racy" emails that had just arrived on his desk, Eakin wrote in a Friday letter to state judicial conduct investigators that he also released publicly. Eakin said he did not dispute a Philadelphia Daily News report that he had received two emails with pictures of topless or completely nude women, plus one allegedly racist email in 2010. The emails went to a private email account he held under the name "John Smith," Eakin said. Eakin wrote that he had not seen the material, and reported the matter to the Judicial Conduct Board to determine if the emails had violated any rules. Castille declined comment Friday. In a statement, McCaffery denied threatening or coercing Eakin, ever having Eakin's personal emails or leaking them to reporters. In Eakin's letter to the Judicial Conduct Board, he recounted a telephone conversation he had with McCaffery on Thursday, the day after Castille disclosed that he had found that McCaffery used a private email address to send or receive 234 emails with sexually explicit material or pornography. McCaffery sent most of the emails to an agent in the attorney general's office, who then forwarded the emails to others in the office, Castille said. Eakin said an agitated McCaffery suggested that he had emails involving Eakin and threatened to make them public if Eakin did not persuade the chief justice to retract statements he had made about McCaffery's involvement in the scandal. "The subject of much recent publicity concerning the sending of salacious emails, Justice McCaffrey next told me he 'was not going down alone,'" Eakin wrote to the Judicial Conduct Board. "Justice McCaffrey told me that I had to cause the Chief Justice to retract his media statements of the prior day. I told him I would not attempt to do so even if it were possible. He repeated that I had to, and that he 'needed an answer' by noon to prevent release of the emails involving my account." McCaffery gave a much different account of the conversation, saying it was Eakin who was "agitated" after he telephoned to inform him of rumors that Eakin's personal email account contained hundreds of sexually explicit or racially offensive images. "What I did do was to try to help him prepare himself for the same kind of media onslaught that I have endured, and urged him to talk to his close, personal friend, Ronald Castille, to stop the mud-slinging that has so tarnished our court," McCaffery wrote. "In light of my own recent experience, and given the way these emails have been leaking, I expressed my concern for him, especially because of the racially charged emails, which, as I recall, I told him I feared could bring him down." McCaffrey said Eakin told him he had already written earlier in the week to Castille to urge him to "stop putting out all of this information." The chairwoman of the Judicial Conduct Board, Anne Lazarus, said Friday that she had seen a copy of the letter, but did not want to comment on it. A board official said it was investigating the matter. Castille has said that a majority of justices could vote to suspend a fellow justice, but Justice Correale Stevens said Friday that there was no meeting scheduled between the justices to discuss the matter. On Thursday, McCaffery apologized for a "lapse in judgment" over his role in sending the emails, but also attacked Castille as being on an "egomaniacal mission to 'get me.'" He called criticism of his actions a "cooked-up controversy" that is part of "a vindictive pattern of attacks" against him by Castille. The McCaffrey emails were among the hundreds of emails containing pornographic images and videos discovered by the attorney general's office on its computers from 2008 through 2012. A Philadelphia Democrat, McCaffery was elected to the seven-member bench in 2007. Castille and Eakin are both Republicans. Castille was elected in 1993, Eakin in 2001. The scandal is erupting less than two years after another justice, Joan Orie Melvin, was convicted of corruption and sentenced to three years of house arrest.