had not found the accusations of serial underage gang rape particularly plausible.
Kavanaugh himself soon issued a terse statement: “This is ridiculous and from the Twilight Zone. I don’t know who this is and this never happened.”63
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer interviewed Kavanaugh’s attorney Beth Wilkinson and treated the Swetnick charges as a game-changer. He played a video clip of Kellyanne Conway from days earlier saying that there was no pattern of behavior that matched Ford’s allegation. Acknowledging that Conway had a “significant point,” Blitzer added, “But since then Deborah Ramirez has come forward and Julie Swetnick has come forward, and her allegations are very, very brutal in this sworn affidavit.” New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait warned, “As the number of accusations rises . . . the odds that a charge will be one of the rare hoaxes diminishes,” and he confidently concluded that Kavanaugh was finished.64
Democrats and the media had gone all-in on Swetnick before vetting her wild accusations, but by Wednesday evening it began to appear that they had made a serious mistake. She had unpaid debts and had been fired for lying on an employment application and for inappropriate sexual conduct toward coworkers. A frequent litigant, Swetnick had made false claims in a personal injury lawsuit against the Washington Metro system, claiming more than $420,000 in lost earnings and naming as her employer a friend for whom she had never worked.
Her ex-boyfriend Richard Vinneccy said that Swetnick threatened him after they broke up—even after he was engaged to someone else and had a baby. She had “harassed and stalked” him, threatening to kill him, his girlfriend, and their unborn child. She threatened to file a rape charge against Vinneccy and to have him, a U.S. citizen, deported. She made other bizarre and false statements, telling him that she wouldn’t grant him a divorce (they had never been married) and that she was pregnant with twins. He had filed for a restraining order against her but never completed the process for fear of having to see her in person and disclose his whereabouts to her. “I know a lot about her. . . . She’s not credible at all,” he told Politico. “Not at all.”65 In a statement to the Judiciary Committee he speculated that “[h]er motives may be for financial gain or notoriety but they are certainly not to expose the truth.”66
It became even clearer that Swetnick was unreliable, to put it mildly, when Dennis Ketterer, a former meteorologist in the Washington area, disclosed that he had had an extramarital affair with her in 1993. Their relationship had become physical but never led to intercourse, in part because she told him that she enjoyed group sex. When she said that she “first tried sex with multiple guys while in high school and still liked it from time to time,” Ketterer broke the relationship off, worried about contracting a sexually transmitted disease.
Years later Ketterer tried to get back in touch with Swetnick when he was running for Congress as a Democrat, but her father steered him away, warning that she had “psychological and other problems at the time.” Ketterer had gone public with his story after consultation with a church leader, deciding to reveal the affair to prevent Swetnick from misleading others. Taking “eternal considerations” into account and saying that “[m]y heart still feels heavy,” he concluded that “based on my direct experience with Julie, I do not believe her allegations against Kavanaugh.”
Now his high school friends moved quickly to defend Kavanaugh. Forty of them sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee saying they had never met or heard of a Julie Swetnick, nor had they witnessed any activity that matched her description.
Swetnick’s allegations did far more damage to Michael Avenatti’s reputation (and to his short-lived presidential aspirations) than to Kavanaugh’s. The impression of a pattern of sexual aggression in Kavanaugh’s life was undone by a pattern of increasingly implausible false accusations. Ford could not back up her allegation, but at least it sounded plausible. Each subsequent allegation against Kavanaugh sounded more desperate and ridiculous.
Kavanaugh’s supporters warned that the country must not tolerate the political tactic of destroying people’s lives and reputations with unsubstantiated allegations and outlandish claims. Swetnick’s accusation, which people like Jonathan Chait took at face value but which proved to be absurd, reminded Americans why it is important to treat the accused as innocent until they are proved guilty. Ramirez, Swetnick, and Avenatti changed the course of the nomination. Kavanaugh was no longer on his heels.