assaulted a woman on a boat in Newport in 1985; based on a yearbook photo, the caller thought one of the men was Kavanaugh. Whitehouse refused to provide the committee investigators with any contact information for the caller, but did refer the man to a reporter.70 NBC News and other outlets reported the allegation, leading many reporters to tweet about a “4th Kavanaugh accuser.”71 Kavanaugh strenuously denied the accusation, stating that he had never even been on a boat in or around Newport, Rhode Island, let alone assaulted anyone on one.
Eventually, the committee was able to track down the caller, identified as Jeffrey Catalan. He had a Twitter account where he had also called for a military coup against Trump. He implored the Pentagon to get rid of the “parasite” Trump and accused the president of “manslaughter.” He later recanted his accusations against Kavanaugh on “[T]o everyone who is going crazy about what I had said I have recanted because I have made a mistake and apologize for such mistake.”72 A few days later, the committee referred him to the Justice Department for perhaps making false statements to Congress and obstructing a congressional investigation—a warning to Democrats about recklessly slinging allegations to destroy Kavanaugh’s reputation.
An anonymous report submitted to Senator Cory Gardner of Colorado charged that Kavanaugh had pushed a woman he was dating against a wall “very aggressively and sexually.” The anonymous woman said that her daughter was a friend of the victim. The committee determined that Kavanaugh was dating Dabney Friedrich at the time of the alleged push. Now a U.S. district court judge, Friedrich signed a statement calling the accusations “offensive and absurd” and saying Kavanaugh had always treated her with the “utmost respect.”73
An anonymous letter sent to Senator Kamala Harris’s San Diego office recounted that Kavanaugh, with the help of a friend, sexually assaulted a woman while driving her home from a party. The same accuser also sent an email to the Judiciary Committee staff. She alleged that he physically assaulted her and forced her to perform sexual acts. Both men raped her repeatedly, she wrote, and Kavanaugh warned her that nobody would believe her. The letter stipulated neither a date nor a location for the alleged attack. Kavanaugh denied the allegations.
A woman named Judy Munro-Leighton said she was the victim. She turned out to be a liberal activist who lived not in California but in Kentucky. In a phone call, she admitted that her accusation was “just a ploy,” made “because I was angry.” Asked if she’d ever met Kavanaugh, she said, “Oh Lord, no.”74
As these other allegations came out, some Senate Democrats and their staff worried that the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee were releasing all the allegations they were getting to make Ford’s allegations look frivolous. And indeed, the allegations were being released strategically by Grassley’s aide Davis. While clerking for Justice Gorsuch, he had heard Justice Thomas tell a story from his youth in Georgia. When a dog killed a chicken, they would tie the dead chicken around the dog’s neck and let it rot there. The dog would lose its taste for chicken. Davis wanted Democrats to lose their taste for destroying people’s lives with unsubstantiated allegations. He would tie every reckless smear and false allegation around their necks so that they would face at least some of the consequences for what they were doing.
Still, the committee was being discreet, even with an allegation made against Avenatti himself. For example, according to a public records request, on September 24, the committee’s whistle-blower hotline received an email with the subject line “Michael Avenatti Assaulted Me.” The text of the email asserted that Avenatti had sexually assaulted the sender of the email in 2012 at a private party in Seattle: “I’m nervous about what to do with this, as my family doesn’t know that I am bisexual. I would like it to be known but don’t know if I’m ready for my name and information to be public.” The sender added that “this isn’t a ploy and I would really like some advicement [sic].” The committee forwarded the email to a sergeant in the Seattle police force as “the appropriate local law enforcement agency.” The whistle-blower tip line, the committee noted, “receives a range of claims, ranging from legitimate issues to fabrications to statements from people who seem to be mentally ill.”
The sergeant in Seattle wrote that she discussed the allegation and next steps with a lieutenant: “We both discussed the lack