a girl inside the room. These boys included Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh.” Swetnick said she was a victim of one of these rapes in 1982 and had told at least two other people at the time it happened. Witnesses, she attested, would support each of her allegations.58
Ashley heard the news while she was getting her hair done. Her hairdresser had suggested, after seeing her Fox television interview, that she needed an update, and he and his partner immediately went into overdrive to finish her appointment when they sensed that she needed to get back home and out of the public eye.
Ashley and her friends continued to share scripture with each other. Two verses from the readings at Mass the day before the hearing seemed particularly apposite: “Put falsehood and lying far from me” (Proverbs 30:8) and “Falsehood I hate and abhor” (Psalm 119:163). While Ashley and her friends drew comfort from the music of the Christian artists Lauren Daigle and Julianna Zobrist, her husband found his mind returning to a song frequently sung in chapel at Georgetown Prep: “Be Not Afraid.” He and his friends used to make fun of the way their beloved music teacher Gary Daum sang the hymn. But the joke was on them, as the frequent repetition had the intended effect—Kavanaugh remembered the words and took them to heart. And when he needed them, those three words came back to him: “Be not afraid, be not afraid.”
Swetnick’s accusations were obviously ridiculous. No one could have hidden such crimes for decades, much less a man who went on to hold high-profile positions in the White House and then became a judge on the second-most prominent federal court. Her presence at any parties with Kavanaugh was implausible, because she attended the relatively distant Gaithersburg High School and then Montgomery County Community College, neither of which was represented among Kavanaugh’s circle of friends.
Swetnick, who graduated from high school in 1980, would have been a legal adult throughout Kavanaugh’s alleged career as a gang rapist. Her story, if true, was an admission that as an adult she had attended ten or more parties hosted by minors where other minors were raped yet did nothing to stop these child rapes and did not alert the authorities.
The accusations, though incredible, were horrifying, and Democrats seized on them. “In light of shocking new allegations detailed by Julie Swetnick in a sworn affidavit, we write to request that the committee vote on Brett Kavanaugh be immediately canceled and that you support the re-opening of the FBI investigation,” the Judiciary Committee’s Democrats wrote to Grassley.59
Journalists, more interested in publicizing the accusations than in probing their obvious holes, showed no restraint either. Just as Ramirez’s allegations shared details with Ford’s, Swetnick’s shared details with both of them. The inclusion of Mark Judge fit the pattern that Kavanaugh critics were looking for.
The charges were not only implausible but conveniently vague. Swetnick did not name any of the persons whom Kavanaugh supposedly abused, making the allegations impossible to disprove. Many of the alleged misdeeds she said she had heard about but had not witnessed. She mentioned that she had attended “Beach Week,” as if she were part of the same social group as Kavanaugh, but she did not bring it up until after the publication of Kavanaugh’s high school–era calendars, in which “BEACH WEEK” is written across one of the weeks. The media, nevertheless, dutifully reported the news with all the gravity they could muster: yet another woman had accused Kavanaugh of sexually abusive behavior. That was enough for Chuck Schumer, who called for Kavanaugh to withdraw on account of “another serious allegation of sexual misconduct.”60
The Washington Post liked this new accuser’s credentials: “Julie Swetnick, who Wednesday became the third woman to accuse Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, is an experienced web developer in the Washington area who has held multiple security clearances for her work on government-related networks.”61 This was no psychologically fragile academic who was afraid to fly. This was a woman with “multiple security clearances.”
MSNBC promptly interviewed Avenatti, and CNN’s John King introduced the story by touting Swetnick’s security clearances, failing to mention that Kavanaugh himself had been repeatedly cleared at the highest levels. King talked to a sex crimes prosecutor named Julie Grohovsky, who said the allegations reflected on Kavanaugh’s ethical behavior and credibility. They needed to be fully investigated, she said.
Citing anonymous sources, CNN reported that Senator Susan Collins “appeared unnerved” by the Swetnick allegations.62 In fact, Collins