HARRISBURG — A Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice said Friday that a colleague at the center of a pornographic e-mail 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” e-mails Eakin had received at a private e-mail 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” e-mails 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 e-mails with pictures of topless or completely nude women, plus one allegedly racist e-mail in 2010. The e-mails went to a private e-mail 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 e-mails had violated any rules.

Castille declined to comment Friday. In a statement, McCaffery denied threatening or coercing Eakin, ever having Eakin’s personal e-mails 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 e-mail address to send or receive 234 e-mails with sexually explicit material or pornography. McCaffery sent most of the e-mails to an agent in the attorney general’s office, who then forwarded the e-mails to others in the office, Castille said.

Eakin said an agitated McCaffery suggested that he had e-mails 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.

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 e-mail 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 e-mails have been leaking, I expressed my concern for him, especially because of the racially charged e-mails, 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.”