“aggressive and even belligerent” when drinking. Kavanaugh’s roommate at the time, James Roche, said that although he never witnessed any sexual misconduct, Kavanaugh was “frequently, incoherently drunk.”
Senator Mazie Hirono, whose staff had aroused the suspicion of Republican staffers by arriving at work uncharacteristically early that Sunday morning, pounced: “This is another serious, credible, and disturbing allegation against Brett Kavanaugh [that] should be fully investigated.” An unnamed Senate aide was quoted as saying, “If established, they’re clearly disqualifying.” Ramirez herself “is now calling for the F.B.I. to investigate Kavanaugh’s role in the incident,” Farrow and Mayer reported.
Ramirez acknowledged that she didn’t remember much except “laughter at her expense from Kavanaugh and the other students,” a detail curiously similar to one in Ford’s story. The New Yorker noted that Kavanaugh would have been eighteen years old, a legal adult, at the time, and that if the allegation were true, he would have perjured himself, having sworn that he had never “committed any verbal or physical harassment or assault of a sexual nature.”
The article was written in a breathless style that gave it a sense of significance, even though it betrayed more than a whiff of desperation. Mayer even admitted that she and Farrow had pursued the story precisely to show a “pattern of misconduct,” since “that helps establish who is telling the truth when there is a standoff, and whether there were credible corroborators on either side.”3
The writers included lurid stories about Kavanaugh’s friends and milieu without establishing any connection to Kavanaugh himself. Elizabeth Rasor, who had dated Kavanaugh’s friend Mark Judge, reported that Judge had “told her ashamedly of an incident that involved him and other boys taking turns having sex with a drunk woman.” Judge “categorically” denied the report. Another woman had told Ford’s lawyers that when she was in high school in the 1980s, “she had witnessed boys at parties that included Georgetown Prep students” get girls drunk with “jungle juice”—a mix of grain alcohol and Hawaiian Punch—and then try to take advantage of them. The four-thousand-word story ended with lawyers for both Ford and Ramirez calling for an FBI investigation, the same thing the Democrats were demanding.
When the New Yorker article was published, the stories of group sex and spiked punch seemed irrelevant. They shed no light on Ramirez’s allegations and were only faintly relevant to statements in support of Kavanaugh in connection with an unrelated allegation. Mark Judge had previously been asked by the Weekly Standard whether he recalled any “sort of rough-housing with a female student back in high school” that could be “interpreted differently by parties involved,” and the New Yorker had noted his flat denial.4 Rasor’s story certainly did nothing to burnish Judge’s image, but it didn’t contradict his statement about roughhousing. Her story supposedly “undercut Judge’s protestations about the sexual innocence of Georgetown Prep,” but Judge, who years earlier had written frankly of his substance abuse struggles, never claimed such innocence.
The “jungle juice” story was even weaker. There was no connection between what other Georgetown Prep students may have done at unspecified parties sometime in the 1980s and what Kavanaugh was alleged to have done at one particular party, let alone at Yale. But those stories would be cited again soon enough.
At 7:33 p.m., shortly after the New Yorker story was published, a lawyer named Michael Avenatti tweeted: “I represent a woman with credible information regarding Judge Kavanaugh and Mark Judge. We will be demanding the opportunity to present testimony to the committee and will likewise be demanding that Judge and others be subpoenaed to testify. The nomination must be withdrawn.”5 His client was not Ramirez, he said.
Avenatti, who had become an anti-Trump hero for his hardball representation of the porn star Stormy Daniels in her legal tangles with the president, promised “significant evidence of multiple house parties” in the 1980s at which Kavanaugh would “participate in the targeting of women with alcohol/drugs in order to allow a ‘train’ of men to subsequently gang rape them.” Multiple witnesses would corroborate the allegation, he said, and they must be called to testify.6
As far as the chattering classes of D.C. were concerned, if Kavanaugh’s confirmation had any life left in it before Sunday evening, it was indisputably dead now.
For Kavanaugh, the moment was brutal. This was precisely why he had feared delaying a vote on his confirmation. Delays allowed his opponents to troll for people who’d be willing to say something—anything—to discredit him. Time was not his friend.