interviewed the witness who, as NBC delicately put it, had “apparent inconsistencies” with her earlier sworn statement.32 The inconsistencies in fact completely undercut the earlier statement.
As for who had spiked the punch, she said, “I didn’t ever think it was Brett.” When NBC inquired about whether Kavanaugh had ever acted inappropriately with women, she said, “No.” While she described a heavy-drinking party scene that Kavanaugh and Judge were a part of, she also denied that Kavanaugh had been abusive toward women when she was there, adding, “I would not ever allow anyone to be abusive in my presence. Male or female.” She placed much of the blame for the false statements in the declaration on Avenatti himself, saying she had only skimmed it before signing and that she had been very clear with Avenatti about facts like not having seen anyone spike the punch. She finally decided to break with Avenatti altogether, telling NBC, “I do not like that he twisted my words.”
This news should have been sensational, but as other outlets ran with the story of Avenatti’s apparently corroborative second affidavit, NBC stayed silent, not breaking the news of the witness’s disavowal until October 25, a baffling newsroom decision that suggests the network was loath to publish more exculpatory reports for Kavanaugh. The report was ultimately released the same day the Senate Judiciary Committee referred both Swetnick and Avenatti to the Department of Justice to be investigated for making false statements to the committee in violation of federal law.33
The Ramirez story did not fall apart so much as it never held together to begin with. A woman, who by her own admission had been incoherently drunk during the incident she described, spent a week in September with lawyers coaching her, and the only assertions she could make were that what could have been a real penis was in her face and that Brett Kavanaugh was in the room and moved his hips. To bolster the threadbare story, the media ran stories of Kavanaugh’s other college hijinks.
On the evening of October 1, the same day NBC ran the disastrous Swetnick interview, the New York Times ran a front-page story about a bar scuffle Kavanaugh got into while he was a college student at Yale that involved throwing ice.34 Senator Hirono declared the episode “very relevant” and demanded that the FBI investigate.35 Friends were aghast at the story told by Chad Ludington, saying that he was not close to Kavanaugh and that the event was overblown.
The lead author of the piece was Emily Bazelon, a former Slate writer who had published numerous articles deploring conservative jurisprudence and had announced her opposition to Kavanaugh’s nomination earlier that summer. By normal journalistic standards, Bazelon’s personal opinions about Kavanaugh at least should have been disclosed. The Times later admitted the error; while it still stood by the story, it stated, “[Bazelon] is not a newsroom reporter. . . . In retrospect, editors should have used a newsroom reporter for that assignment.”36 But it was startling that the story was published at all, let alone on the front page of a paper whose own tagline suggests that some news is in fact not fit to print.
On the same day the Times embarrassed itself by magnifying the trivial, NBC revealed the lengths to which the media were prepared to go to resuscitate Deborah Ramirez’s discredited allegation. Heidi Przybyla and Leigh Ann Caldwell reported that Kavanaugh and his team had attempted to refute Ramirez’s story before it was published.37 If a man is asked to comment on an allegation against him of egregious sexual misconduct, it might be considered normal for him to try to clear his name before that allegation is published. In NBC’s view, however, Kavanaugh’s “personally talking with former classmates about Ramirez’s story in advance of the New Yorker article that made her allegation public” was sinister. It would have been more seemly, it seems, to stand aside while a coordinated campaign was waged against him, without even calling friends to see if they would be willing to go on the record with their own testimony. (Ramirez’s many calls to classmates and week of being coached by her lawyers did not raise an eyebrow.)
Przybyla and Caldwell revealed a series of private text messages between Kerry Berchem and Karen Yarasavage. Berchem, a partner at the powerful law firm Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, was a year behind Kavanaugh and Yarasavage at Yale. The women were friends in college as well as friends of both