whether or not it’s been made worse or better over time.”15
It wasn’t just senators. Faculty, students, and alumni of Yale, obviously unmoved by the collegiate connection, supported Ramirez’s call for an FBI investigation of Kavanaugh. Four dozen faculty members issued a letter demanding an immediate halt to the confirmation process.16 Professors in the law school canceled thirty-one classes to accommodate students busy with a sit-in.17 And more than one thousand female Yale Law School graduates signed a letter supporting Kavanaugh’s accusers.18 Corroboration of the accusations could wait; signatures were being collected even before the New Yorker published its article about Ramirez. Alumni reported furious efforts to assemble mass denunciations of Kavanaugh and to ferret out unflattering stories about him from college. Some were uncomfortable with the rush to judgment but felt it was too dangerous to speak up on Kavanaugh’s behalf.
At the same time, it began to appear that Ramirez’s story might not hold up under scrutiny. The New Yorker article itself contained details that undercut its credibility. It acknowledged that Ramirez had “significant gaps” in her memories, that she was reluctant to speak with certainty about Kavanaugh’s role in the incident, that it took her six days of “assessing her memories” and consulting with an attorney provided by Democrats to name Kavanaugh, and that a robust effort to find eyewitnesses failed to turn up anyone who could confirm that Kavanaugh was even present at the party.
Four other classmates, two of whom were allegedly involved in the incident and a third whose husband was allegedly involved, all said the story was ridiculous. “The behavior she describes would be completely out of character for Brett. In addition, some of us knew Debbie long after Yale, and she never described this incident until Brett’s Supreme Court nomination was pending,” said her classmate Dan Murphy.
Karen Yarasavage said she was best friends with Ramirez at the time and had never heard of the incident. “We shared intimate details of our lives. And I was never told this story by her, or by anyone else. It never came up. I didn’t see it; I never heard of it happening,” she said. Perhaps most damaging to the credibility of the story is the effect heavy drinking may have had on Ramirez’s recollection of what took place in 1983 or 1984. Ramirez admitted she “quickly became inebriated” at the party, ending up “on the floor, foggy and slurring her words.”
Acknowledging Ramirez’s extremely impaired mental state and never quoting her directly and plainly saying that Brett Kavanaugh exposed himself, Farrow and Mayer nevertheless draw surprisingly strong conclusions about Kavanaugh’s guilt. The facts that they actually present are that “a male student pointed a gag plastic penis in her direction” and that Ramirez remembered being on the floor flanked by that student and another male student. They go on to report that a “third male then exposed himself to her” and quote Ramirez as saying, “I remember a penis being in front of my face.” Kavanaugh was standing to her side, they write, and they quote Ramirez as saying, “Brett was laughing,” “I can still see his face, and his hips coming forward, like when you pull up your pants.”
Anticipating that Ramirez “will inevitably be pressed on her motivation for coming forward after so many years, and questioned about her memory, given her drinking at the party,” the authors offer a preemptive rebuttal: “And yet, after several days of considering the matter carefully, she said, ‘I’m confident about the pants coming up, and I’m confident about Brett being there.’ ” Readers are again oddly left to connect the dots themselves about the defining event of the entire story.
National Review’s Charles Cooke wrote that he was “struggling to remember reading a less responsible piece of ‘journalism’ in a major media outlet.”19 Even the New York Times admitted the story’s failures. Noting that the New Yorker had not been able to confirm with other witnesses that Kavanaugh was even at the party, the paper conducted its own interviews with “several dozen people” but “could find no one with firsthand knowledge” of the allegations. The Times learned that “Ms. Ramirez herself contacted former Yale classmates asking if they recalled the incident and told some of them that she could not be certain Mr. Kavanaugh was the one who exposed himself.”20
It was at this moment that a number of people on Kavanaugh’s White House team suspected the anti-Kavanaugh forces had finally overplayed their hand. The tide was turning.
Farrow, who had become something of a