When Brett Kavanaugh was nominated for a position with the Supreme Court, reviews were positive. A D.C. native, the judge had made a lot of good impressions on his way to serving on the country’s second highest court. He has written opinions in some 300 cases, and the Supreme Court has endorsed his positions 13 times, an unprecedented rate.
Democrats fought his nomination tooth and nail, but had little to work with. Instead, they resorted to inviting protesters to disrupt proceedings and a bit of Spartacus-themed grandstanding.
On the eve of his confirmation, Judiciary Committee ranking member Sen. Dianne Feinstein and her staff orchestrated a leak of confidential information alleging a mysterious sexual assault. Christine Blasey Ford then publicly alleged that Kavanaugh attempted to rape her at a small house party in an undetermined year and at an undetermined location in the 1980s. She says she feared for her life. She says she never told anyone about it until 2012, the same year the prominent judge was first named as a potential Supreme Court nominee. There is no evidence she named him then or prior.
She has given varying accounts of how many people were at the party, but at last count all four people she named as witnesses, including a close female friend, have said in sworn statements that they are unfamiliar with what she is talking about. Kavanaugh, for his part, says the incident never happened.
Despite the unsubstantiated and even disputed nature of her claim, Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Charles Grassley took it seriously and delayed the vote so that a hearing could be held for her testimony and Kavanaugh’s response. After many delays and curious demands, that hearing is currently scheduled for Thursday at 10:00 a.m. Feinstein says she’s uncertain if Blasey Ford will even show.
Blasey Ford’s claim is nearly impossible to prove or disprove. However, even though Kavanaugh denies it ever having happened, it was at least a possibility.
Since then, however, two more claims have come through that are so weak that they serve to make Blasey Ford’s already disputed argument even more difficult to accept.
On Sunday night, the disreputable Jane Mayer joined with Ronan Farrow to publish an allegation in the New Yorker that never should have been published due to their complete lack of corroboration or supporting evidence. A woman named Deborah Ramirez claimed that she recovered a memory in recent days of an alleged sexual assault by a man she thinks might have been Brett Kavanaugh from 30-some years prior.
Although she hadn’t been sure for the last 35 years who her alleged assailant was, she now thinks it was him after spending six days consulting with her lawyer about it. The New York Times reported that dozens upon dozens of people they interviewed were unable to corroborate her claims, and that Ramirez had even recently told friends she wasn’t sure it was Kavanaugh.
Then Michael Avenatti claimed that Kavanaugh was the mastermind behind a secret gang rape cartel as a high school teenager in Maryland. Kavanaugh, for his part, completely deflated the smear campaign when he revealed that he was able to be so categorical in denying these allegations on account of being a virgin in high school and college.
By the time Avenatti put forth more detailed claims from his mystery third accuser, it had all gotten even more ridiculous. A woman claimed that while she was an adult, she attended high school parties orchestrated by Kavanaugh. She claims he led many gang rapes and that she was a victim of one such gang rape after witnessing many others. She claims she voluntarily attended nearly a dozen such parties where children were raped, but kept going back, occasionally avoiding drinking alcohol at them, and was eventually gang raped herself. There is no support for any of her claims, nor has she attempted to explain why she never informed authorities of the repeated crimes she witnessed at the hands of a notorious child gang rape cult.
It is difficult, to understate wildly, to take such a claim seriously. Particularly without evidence.
And the ultimate result is that it makes it much more difficult to look at the first allegation independent of what is obviously a coordinated game of rather outlandish character assassination from Democrats and their media allies.
One of the lessons of the #MeToo era had been that accusations create a bit of a snowball effect. When one woman steps forward, it gives confidence to others to speak out. That didn’t work quite the same way for Kavanaugh because he had a stellar reputation among women and had been the subject of six extensive background checks. If he engaged in this pattern of behavior, the likelihood it would have been caught, much less discussed, increases.
The ridiculous secondary and tertiary accusations mean that Ford’s stance was more believable when she stood alone. It’s reasonable to wonder if the FBI missed a one-off incident from high school. It is exceedingly difficult to believe they and the media didn’t catch a serial gang rapist with numerous victims.
