She told the girls what they needed to know, not wanting them to hear it from anyone else, and reassured them that they could ask her and their father anything, and they would be as honest as possible.
Friends hurried to help, offering to bring meals and take care of the girls and making sure everyone was okay. They would take the girls for extended playdates to keep them entertained. One set of friends had taken Liza to the Columbia Country Club for lunch when news about the allegations came on the television in the restaurant. Someone rushed over to turn it off.
Ashley prayed regularly and studied the Bible. After the attacks of 9/11, she had come across a verse in the scriptures about not being afraid. She wrote it on a sticky note and put it on her desk outside the Oval Office where she would see it frequently. It gave her the courage to support President Bush and others who had much more on their minds. Nearly seventeen years later, the day after her husband was nominated, she had come across a passage from Psalm 37: “Commit your way to the Lord, trust also in Him, and He shall bring it to pass.” Now, in very different but no less difficult circumstances, she wrote the verse on a sticky note and placed it on her bulletin board at home where it would give her encouragement.
The Monday after the Ford allegations broke, Ashley was incredibly tired. One of the verses for the day in Jesus Calling, a popular daily devotional, was Psalm 37:5.81 Coming across that familiar verse was profoundly comforting. She felt confident that her husband’s nomination was meant to be because she had prayed so hard that he wouldn’t get it, but the attacks on this good and decent man made no sense. They were hard to take.
Leland Keyser’s announcement that she did not know Kavanaugh was gravely damaging to Ford’s already improbable account. This lifelong friend, a woman who had every incentive to blur the lines, was unable to corroborate the allegation. Hugely relieved, the Kavanaughs expected the story to be big news. When instead it was barely reported, they knew they were in trouble.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Too Big To Fail
“ANOTHER WOMAN?” blared the headline, in all caps and all red for emphasis.1 It was 5:30 on Sunday evening, September 23, and the Drudge Report, which had famously broken the news about President Bill Clinton’s sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky in 1998, teased the idea that an explosive new allegation against Kavanaugh was coming. The story would be told by Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, the website said. Because Farrow helped kick off the #MeToo movement by breaking the Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment scandal a year before, his name gave the headline an air of credibility.
That evening the story was published.2 Senate Democrats were investigating “a new allegation of sexual misconduct” that had been conveyed to them by an unnamed “civil-rights lawyer.”
A Yale classmate of Kavanaugh’s named Deborah Ramirez alleged that during their freshman year, “Kavanaugh had exposed himself at a drunken dormitory party, thrust his penis in her face, and caused her to touch it without her consent as she pushed him away.”
After contacting “several dozen” classmates, the New Yorker was unable to find a witness to corroborate the story. One anonymous classmate said he had heard about the incident from another student at the time: “I’ve known this all along. It’s been on my mind all these years when his name came up. It was a big deal.” He said Kavanaugh was “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