By John McCormack
Sunday, September 15, 2019
If you opened Twitter on Sunday morning, you were likely
greeted with the bombshell headline of the top trending news story: “NYT
reporters’ book details new sexual assault allegation against Brett Kavanaugh.”
The allegation, Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly write in a New York Times story adapted from their
forthcoming anti-Kavanaugh book, is this: “We also uncovered a previously
unreported story about Mr. Kavanaugh in his freshman year that echoes Ms.
Ramirez’s allegation. A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants
down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the
hand of a female student.”
Wait a second. Who did what to whom?
Kavanaugh’s “friends pushed his penis into the hand of a
female student”?
Can someone explain the logistics of the allegation here?
Was Kavanaugh allegedly walking around naked when his friends pushed him into
the female student?
No, if I’m reading Pogrebin and Kelly right, the friends
didn’t push Kavanaugh in the back. Rather, the “friends pushed his penis.”
What? How does that happen? Who are the friends? Who is
the female student? Were there any witnesses besides Stier?
All that the authors write in the New York Times essay about corroborating the story is this: “Mr.
Stier, who runs a nonprofit organization in Washington, notified senators and
the F.B.I. about this account, but the F.B.I. did not investigate and Mr. Stier
has declined to discuss it publicly. (We corroborated the story with two
officials who have communicated with Mr. Stier.)”
So they corroborated the fact that Stier made the
allegation to the FBI, but the authors give no indication that they have
corroborated any details of the alleged incident.
The book isn’t released until Tuesday, but Mollie
Hemingway got a copy, and she writes on Twitter: “The book notes, quietly, that
the woman Max Stier named as having been supposedly victimized by Kavanaugh and
friends denies any memory of the alleged event.” Omitting this fact from the New York Times story is one of the worst
cases of journalistic malpractice in recent memory.
If you take this confusing accusation in the essay at
face value, it doesn’t even appear to be an allegation of assault against
Kavanaugh.
If Kavanaugh’s “friends pushed his penis,” then isn’t it
an allegation of wrongdoing against Kavanaugh’s “friends,” not Kavanaugh
himself? Surely even a modern liberal Yalie who’s been to one of those weird non-sexual
“naked parties” would recognize both the female student and Kavanaugh are
both alleged victims in this alleged incident, barring an additional allegation
that a college-aged Kavanaugh asked his “friends” to “push his penis.”
The new allegation is supposed to help lend credence to
the on-the-record allegation that Kavanaugh’s Yale classmate Deborah Ramirez
made in 2018. Pogrebin and Kelly sum up Ramirez’s allegation: “She and some
classmates had been drinking heavily when, she says, a freshman named Brett
Kavanaugh pulled down his pants and thrust his penis at her, prompting her to
swat it away and inadvertently touch it. Some of the onlookers, who had been
passing around a fake penis earlier in the evening, laughed.”
Pogrebin and Kelly downplay Ramirez’s own doubts about
whether Kavanaugh did what she now alleges, choosing rather to lard up their New York Times story with details that
are supposed to demonstrate how under-privileged Ramirez was: She had to sell
ice cream during the summer in high school, bought a cheap car, and only had an
above-ground swimming pool as a
teenager (the horror).
None of these details corroborates her accusation against
Kavanaugh. But the story is framed to make it seem like Kavanaugh was the type
of privileged jerk who might expose himself in front of an under-privileged
college classmate.
As I wrote last October, here’s why Ramirez’s allegation
was dubious:
Deborah Ramirez is the Yale
classmate of Kavanaugh’s who now claims that Kavanaugh exposed himself as a
college freshman at a party. Ramirez’s claim was already dubious because (1)
named eyewitnesses deny the allegation and (2) Ramirez herself wasn’t sure in recent weeks if Kavanaugh had done
what she now alleges. “Ms. Ramirez herself contacted former Yale classmates
asking if they recalled the incident and told some of them that she could not
be certain Mr. Kavanaugh was the one who exposed himself,” the New York Times reported. Ramirez was
only willing to make the allegation, the New
Yorker reported, after “six days of carefully assessing her memories and
consulting with her attorney.”
Pogrebin and Kelly write that a couple students say they
had heard about the alleged incident in the days after it allegedly occurred,
but the authors provide no indication there is any first-hand witness to
corroborate the allegation.
We already knew before Kavanaugh was confirmed last
October that the “corroborating” source for Ramirez’s claim, classmate Kenneth
Appold, was not present when the alleged incident occurred, but Appold told the
New Yorker he was
“one-hundred-percent-sure” he heard about it from an eyewitness. Shortly before
Kavanaugh was confirmed, the New Yorker
reported that Appold’s supposed eyewitness “said that he had no memory of the
incident.”
Maybe Pogrebin and Kelly’s book is stronger than their
essay. But I’m skeptical. “In the end they turn up no smoking gun,” Hanna Rosin
writes in her New York Times review
of the book.
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