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 folk hero for exposing other powerful male sexual predators, now had to defend his story. On CNN he said Ramirez’s story “exceeds the evidentiary basis we’ve used in the past in several cases that were found to be very credible,” bringing his previous stories into question as well.21
“By discarding the basic standards of evidence and journalism, Ronan Farrow has set the Me Too Movement back,” wrote David Marcus in The Federalist (where one of this book’s authors is a senior editor).22 It did not help Farrow’s credibility that his co-author was Mayer, whose partisan record gave Republicans good reason to believe that her reporting on Kavanaugh was driven by her political agenda. By Monday evening, Drudge’s headline “ANOTHER WOMAN?” had given way to “RONAN MISFIRES?”23
But the major media were less skeptical, flooding the airwaves and internet with stories of the drunken sexual predator about to become an arbiter of women’s rights on the Supreme Court. Although the New York Times poked holes in Ramirez’s account, two days later it published a lengthy report about an obscure anti-Trump Mormon women’s group that was joining the Democrats’ call for an investigation.24
As if the Washington Post’s initial effort on behalf of Ford weren’t enough, it ran a 2,500-word hagiographical profile of her25 while publishing stories such as “How in the World Is Mark Judge Not Testifying?”26 That week, the Post also published a ten-thousand-word, multi-part investigative essay about a woman traumatized by rape in high school that acknowledged that she had misidentified one of her schoolmate rapists.27 The paper failed to acknowledge that Kavanaugh’s accusers might commit such errors.
Kavanaugh, as he had done from the beginning, stayed on offense, sending a letter to Senators Grassley and Feinstein that made it clear he would fight back as a matter of principle to clear his name:
These are smears, pure and simple. And they debase our public discourse. But they are also a threat to any man or woman who wishes to serve our country. Such grotesque and obvious character assassination—if allowed to succeed—will dissuade competent and good people of all political persuasions from service. As I told the Committee during my hearing, a federal judge must be independent, not swayed by public or political pressure. That is the kind of judge I will always be. I will not be intimidated into withdrawing from this process. The coordinated effort to destroy my good name will not drive me out. The vile threats of violence against my family will not drive me out. The last-minute character assassination will not succeed.
Kavanaugh’s defiant statement called to mind what Clarence Thomas said to Senator Orrin Hatch at his confirmation hearing: “I’d rather die than withdraw from the process. Not for the purpose of serving on the Supreme Court, but for the purpose of not being driven out of this process. I will not be scared. I don’t like bullies. I’ve never run from bullies. I never cry uncle, and I’m not going to cry uncle today, whether I want to be on the Supreme Court or not.”28
Kavanaugh wasn’t going to cry “uncle” either, but would he make it to the Thursday hearings? The media, which had sided overwhelmingly with his accusers, were defaming him around the clock. Something had to be done, the confirmation team thought. He needed to be presented to the public as more than a judicial star with a twenty-four-karat résumé. For the first time in history, a Supreme Court nominee would sit for an interview on television, and his wife would join him.
Supreme Court nominees used to stay silent and stay away during their confirmation process. Not only did they not testify before the Senate, they rarely spoke to the press.
Even during Louis Brandeis’s contentious hearings, which attracted considerable attention from the press, much of it motivated by antisemitism, he said nothing on the record. When the New York Sun pestered him, the nominee said, “I have nothing to say about anything, and that goes for all time and to all newspapers, including both the Sun and the moon.”29 When Robert Bork Jr., a journalist at the time, went on television to defend his father during his confirmation fight, the elder Bork insisted that he stop: “It’s undignified, I don’t want you doing this, I don’t want my family doing this.” Official surrogates were one thing, but the nominee himself, and even his family, must remain aloof.
A television interview with the nominee would be such a break with tradition that the White House wanted to clear it with the Senate. McConnell said to go ahead.
Several interviewers were considered, the leading contenders being Jan Crawford at CBS and Martha MacCallum at Fox News (a cable channel for which one of this book’s authors is a contributor). They wanted someone who would conduct a serious interview but who would be fair and let Kavanaugh speak—neither a series of softball questions nor a game of “gotcha.”
MacCallum won out, in part because, as much as the team respected Crawford’s integrity, some worried that CBS’s editors would slice and dice the interview to make Kavanaugh look bad. Also, the Fox News audience included conservatives whose support needed to be shored up. The interview would be broadcast in the seven p.m. hour, but clips would air throughout the day, and it would be discussed throughout Fox’s prime-time lineup. As soon as the interview was announced, the major media tried to write it off as a joke. The caustic reaction of Margaret Sullivan, a media columnist for the Washington Post, was typical: “Female interviewer, check. Fox News, check. Bill Shine approved, check. When an ‘exclusive interview’ promises to be a challenge-free infomercial.”30 Dismissing Ashley’s presence, she wrote, “Wife at your side, check,”31 and “Unquestioning adoration would probably be the right look.”32