Kavanaugh and Ramirez. The messages, which Berchem revealed without Yarasavage’s knowledge, are a record of Berchem’s increasingly heavy-handed attempts to dissuade Yarasavage from going on the record, at Kavanaugh’s request, to undermine Ramirez’s allegation.
Berchem thought the messages showed that Kavanaugh was trying to discredit Ramirez as early as July and that his statement in an interview with the Judiciary Committee staff on September 25 that he had no “specific recollection” of interacting with Ramirez at Yarasavage’s wedding in 1997 was a lie. She summarized the messages in a memorandum, which she presented to Senator Blumenthal, who submitted it to the Senate Judiciary Committee. She also submitted the memorandum directly to the FBI. Disappointed that the FBI did not respond, she gave the messages to the press.38
Berchem’s interpretation of the text messages as damaging to Kavanaugh is strained at best. After the announcement of Kavanaugh’s nomination in July, Yarasavage shared a number of college photos with Berchem, including one from her wedding rehearsal dinner in which Ramirez and Kavanaugh appear with Berchem, Yarasavage, and three other persons. Berchem argued that the texts show that Kavanaugh “and/or” his friends “may have initiated an anticipatory narrative” as early as July to “conceal or discredit” Ramirez. But the texts from July consist of shared photos and discussions about a get-together in August; there are no discussions of Kavanaugh.
The messages show that Yarasavage sent the wedding photo to “Brett’s team” on September 22. Berchem concluded that Kavanaugh was lying three days later when he said, “I am sure I saw [Ramirez]” at the wedding but did not “have a specific recollection” of interacting with her.39 But having seen a photo of Ramirez and himself at Yarasavage’s wedding would not necessarily prompt a “specific recollection” of seeing her there.
In fact, the texts themselves are not particularly relevant to the Ramirez investigation. What they do show is Berchem furiously lobbying Yarasavage to speak out against their old friend Kavanaugh. Berchem repeatedly tried to get Yarasavage to change her statement that she did not remember Ramirez’s talking about someone exposing himself to her, or at least remain silent.
Yarasavage said the allegations against Kavanaugh were laughable. She had apparently dated him briefly and described what a gentleman he had been. “Just really hard for me to reconcile any of this,” she wrote. “When I say Brett was vanilla with me, I mean it. He turned his back when I changed in his room.” She added that she didn’t want to hurt either Kavanaugh or Ramirez, but “I know what I know about both people and I can only speak the truth.” She hoped that if she told Ronan Farrow how implausible she found the story, the New Yorker wouldn’t run it.
Yarasavage received a call on Sunday, September 23, from “Brett’s guy”—one of his former clerks—apparently letting her know the New Yorker story was going to run after all. She told Berchem that Kavanaugh asked her to go on the record about the story, and that she was having trouble reaching anyone to speak to at the magazine. Berchem responded by suggesting that Yarasavage not go on record defending Kavanaugh. If Ramirez was telling the truth about Kavanaugh, “maybe that’s why [Ramirez] has had so many issues?” Yarasavage replied that she assumed any issues Ramirez had were with her father, so Berchem tried another tack.
“You know that will kill your friendship,” she wrote. Yarasavage replied, “What friendship? I haven’t spoken to her in 10 years.” Berchem then offered some speculative psychological explanations for why Ramirez had not stayed in touch with Yarasavage, including “your family’s friendship with Brett.”
After Yarasavage repeated that it was “odd that I never heard a word of this,” Berchem replied, “All I am saying is we all figured out how to survive. We had different ways. [Ramirez] does not seem to have survived all that well or particularly strongly. . . . If she is making these allegations now, either she has conviction they happened or she might be crazy. But if it’s the latter, and your commentary publicly makes it worse, would you really want that? . . . Bretz career is on the line. Maybe her life is on the line?” “Just be careful,” she concluded. “There would be no going back.”
The day after the New Yorker story ran, Berchem was back at it with a text reading, “I wish I had told you what to do.” Yarasavage did not respond right away, and in the evening Berchem started in again. This time she