salacious to say? Whatever the reason, the result is a one-sided and inaccurate depiction.”20
It brings to mind the famous line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”21 Time and again, when a reporter was faced with firsthand evidence that Judge Kavanaugh’s reputation as a man of outstanding character was true, he declined to print the story.
Being ignored was perhaps the best that Kavanaugh supporters could hope for. Professor Akhil Amar of Yale Law School provoked the fury of the left by arguing that Kavanaugh was the best possible nominee from the Trump administration.22 The scholar’s arguments were derided in the mainstream press as “crap” and “horses--t” and dismissed as self-serving elitist back-scratching.23 Amar backtracked somewhat on his support after the allegations broke, calling for some investigation of Ford’s claims while noting that his opinion about Kavanaugh’s legal abilities remained unchanged.24
After the confirmation, Senator Susan Collins continued to receive hate mail and threats, including to her family. On October 15, as she was traveling home from Washington, her husband texted her a photo of himself in full hazmat gear. An envelope addressed to him had contained a letter that purported to be infused with ricin. By the time Collins finished her stressful two-hour drive from Portland, her street was blocked off with yellow crime scene tape and her home taken over by the local police and fire department, the FBI, and the army’s weapons of mass destruction unit. The house was quarantined, including their black lab puppy. Their neighbors rushed to their aid, and a local Chinese restaurant and a Wendy’s tried to figure out how to break the blockade and get their favorite meals to them. Collins saw a silver lining: it had provided an excellent drill for the first responders and nobody got hurt. A few days later another envelope was sent to her home labeled “anthrax.”25 Postal inspectors intercepted it and, after determining it contained cornstarch, were able to trace it to the sender, who was charged with sending threatening communications.
Women who attested to Kavanaugh’s character in high school lost friends. Many had to drop off of social media during the confirmation process. All lost a degree of privacy and peace when their names were made public, and reporters hounded them for information about the judge.
Joel Kaplan, a vice president of global public policy for Facebook in Washington, D.C., faced a revolt in his workplace over his desire to support his longtime friend. Kaplan and Kavanaugh and their future wives had worked together in the Bush administration, and the families had remained close—so much so that they would even spend Christmas together. The Kaplans decided to attend the September 27 hearing as a gesture of solidarity. Laura Cox Kaplan held Ashley’s hand. Joel sat behind the judge. He took the day off work and didn’t think to run it by his supervisors because he was there in a personal capacity, standing by a friend during one of his most difficult moments.
When employees at Facebook identified Kaplan in the broadcasts of the hearings, they were outraged. Company message boards were swamped by hundreds of comments, many interpreting his presence at the hearings, implausibly enough, as an implicit endorsement of Kavanaugh by the entire company.
The political atmosphere at Facebook, of course, is monolithically liberal. Just weeks before Kavanaugh’s first hearing, a senior engineer had started the group FB’ers for Political Diversity in protest of the left-wing intolerance that makes Facebook employees “afraid to say anything when they disagree with what’s around them politically.”26 The company had come under scrutiny for such intolerance, and Kaplan was hired as a gesture of political open-mindedness.
Whatever the corporate leadership’s intentions were, Facebook employees did not get the message. They saw Kaplan’s attendance at the hearing as a thumb in the eye of the liberal culture at Facebook. A program manager angrily concluded, “His seat choice was intentional, knowing full well that journalists would identify every public figure appearing behind Kavanaugh. He knew that this would cause outrage internally, but he knew that he couldn’t get fired for it. This was a protest against our culture, and a slap in the face to his fellow employees.”27 Those who sat behind Ford were not subject to such scrutiny, much less attacks.
Other employees interpreted Kaplan’s support for his friend, and even Mark Zuckerberg’s defense of that friendship, as a source of “stress and trauma.”28 A statement by Facebook’s high-profile chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg,