What wouldn’t you believe Brett Kavanaugh did in his past? The majority members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, to prepare themselves and the public for the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford, decided to dump two sets of transcripts of Kavanaugh answering questions into the public record yesterday. So, to the various circulating narratives accusing Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct in his past, everyone could add this:
[NAME REDACTED] reported that early on a Sunday morning in August of 1985, a close acquaintance of the constituent was sexually assaulted by two heavily inebriated men she referred to at the time as Brett and Mark.
The event took place on a 36-foot maroon and white boat in the harbor at Newport, Rhode Island, after the three had met at a local bar. According to [NAME REDACTED], when he learned of the assault at approximately 5:00 a.m. that same morning, he and another individual went to the harbor, located the boat the victim had described and physically confronted the two men, leaving them with significant injuries.
[NAME REDACTED] recently realized that one of the men was Brett Kavanaugh when he saw Kavanaugh’s high school yearbook photo on television over the weekend. He promptly reported the incident to our office on Monday morning, September 24, 2018.
After securing Kavanaugh’s easy denials—”No. I was not in Newport, haven’t been on a boat in Newport. Not with Mark Judge on a boat, nor all those three things combined”—the questioning then went on to tell the nominee that the source of this complaint also had a Twitter account fulminating against Donald Trump and demanding his removal from office.
The aim—a quixotic aim, given that the late day also featured a long-form press conference by the president, in which he ranted about false accusers—was to try to make a stupid news cycle even more stupid. Here was yet more message-board culture in the guise of the public deliberations of democracy. No, Marine Todd didn’t kick Brett Kavanaugh’s ass (two against one!) in defense of a woman’s honor on the docks of Newport, Rhode Island. Nobody believes this thing happened. Nobody ever believed it happened.
The release completed a belated pincer movement by the nominee’s defenders. First there was the letter signed by all the women who vouched for the fact that Kavanaugh had never sexually assaulted them personally; now, from the other direction, came an accusation from someone who had evidently fabricated a sexual assault story. It was proof of concept of the concept of disproof. Maybe if you pile up enough obvious garbage around Brett Kavanaugh, he can’t help but start to look clean again.
