In fact, MacCallum asked tough and probing questions—eliciting, for instance, the revelation that Kavanaugh “did not have sexual intercourse or anything close to sexual intercourse in high school or for many years thereafter”—and she won praise for her interview.
Kavanaugh’s own performance was hotly debated. He did not seem comfortable, and his answers came off as over-rehearsed. Shortly before the interview, a few members of the White House team met with him at the house where he was staying. At the moot the previous week, he had seemed natural and righteously indignant, but now, they noticed, he seemed cautious and over-prepared. “The Bushies had gotten to him,” said one of the White House advisers.
When the White House team stopped holding moots with Kavanaugh, a kitchen cabinet of sorts—including friends who ran communications efforts for President Bush—took its place, providing advice and guidance as he prepared for the next round of hearings. The White House team found Kavanaugh’s forceful denials convincing, but many in this group favored a softer, more sympathetic—even hand-wringing—approach, one that emphasized his relationships with women and affirmed that accusers have to be taken seriously. Kavanaugh himself was memorizing lines that were perfectly reasonable sentiments but would come across as verbal tics during the interview. More than ten times he returned to some variation of the phrase, “I’m just asking for a fair process where I can be heard and defend my integrity.”33 The scripting from advisors extended to encouraging Ashley to wear a necklace with a cross, a suggestion she bristled at and declined.
The White House team realized what was happening and tried to encourage more of what they had seen the previous week, but the interview was looming. It was filmed in a Washington hotel, which was supposed to provide a warm, personal atmosphere without invading the privacy of the Kavanaughs’ own living room. But the room was a disappointment. It was so unattractive, in fact, that someone ran to buy plants so the setting wouldn’t be completely lifeless. The interview was awkward for the typically private Kavanaughs, forced to discuss intimate issues on national television in a room full of cameramen and producers.
Whatever its shortcomings, the interview served its purpose, even if key senators found Kavanaugh a bit robotic. It put him back in the news on his own terms, reminded the media that the man they were accusing of rape was a human being instead of a caricature, and taught him how to respond more effectively. The kinder, gentler Kavanaugh could take him only so far. McGahn would remind him that while he may have worked for Bush, he was a Trump nominee. And Trump fights. For his part, Trump tweeted out his support of Kavanaugh before, during, and after the interview.
Kavanaugh was vexed by the image of him as a crazy drunk. In his mind, he had been a top athlete and a top student who liked to drink on the weekend. He also resented his friends’ being dragged into the controversy. People who wanted to score points on Kavanaugh were painting a caricature of privileged and out-of-control prep school boys with no regard for the collateral damage to innocent people.
It was painful for him to see Georgetown Prep’s reputation unfairly tarnished by ideological zealots in the media, who demanded to know everything from the school’s current enrollment to the details of its sex education curriculum. The Jesuit school took the religious and moral instruction of its students extremely seriously, knowing that adolescent boys would occasionally disappoint, sometimes grievously. And such problems as Georgetown Prep had with sex, drinking, and other teenage failings were hardly unique.
Throughout the ordeal, school officials remained tight-lipped, but their terse and carefully worded statements seemed only to inflame the media’s passion for dirt-digging. New York Times reporters were showing up at football games and peppering alumni with questions. Eventually, the school’s director of marketing and communications, Patrick Coyle, denounced the smear campaign in a letter to the Washington Post’s metro reporter, Joe Heim: “The Washington Post’s coverage of Georgetown Prep in recent weeks has been marred by shoddy reporting and slanted, agenda-driven framing within those stories. Numerous articles were composed and published, for example, without the Post ever offering us the opportunity for reaction or comment.”
Coyle wasn’t exaggerating. A few days later, the paper ran a gossipy report about Georgetown Prep’s search for a new director of alumni relations, playing up the Kavanaugh controversy and asserting that the “listing went up after Georgetown alumni were very much in the news.” Coyle had previously informed the newspaper that the job had been posted since July, long before the Kavanaugh controversy. In response to a correction from Coyle, the Post altered the article as subtly as possible without acknowledging the error.34
Kavanaugh saw that more was at stake than his own career. For the sake of the people at Georgetown Prep and everyone else in his community, he wanted to fight the charges against him.
While the nominee waited to have his say before the Senate and the nation, the president traveled to New York for the annual session of the United Nations General Assembly, where he expressed his opinion of the allegations with characteristic bluntness: “She thinks maybe it could have been him, maybe not. Admits she was drunk. She admits time lapses. This is a person, and this is a series of statements that is going to take one of the most talented intellects from a judicial standpoint in our country, keep him off the U.S. Supreme Court?” He added, “I think it’s horrible what the Democrats have done. It is a con game; they really are con artists.”35
The media were fixated on Kavanaugh’s revelation about his sex life. While it helped explain why he was so confident in his denials of the claims against him, it also exposed him to brutal attacks and ridicule. The news that he was a virgin for “many years” after high school “makes sense since the alleged behavior was disgusted, juvenile, emotionally stunted,” wrote the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin.36
Jimmy Kimmel relentlessly mocked him, playing the clip about his high school and college virginity to audience jeers. After rehearsing all the unsubstantiated allegations against him, Kimmel said, “I think there’s a compromise here; hear me out on this. So, Kavanaugh gets confirmed to the Supreme Court, okay. Well, in return we get to cut that pesky penis of his off in front of everyone.”37
The Washington Post declared, “The virginity defense is a reminder of our ignorance about sexual violence.”38 “Kavanaugh’s ‘choir boy’ image on Fox interview rankles former Yale classmates,” read the headline of yet another Post piece.39 The New Republic argued that by his defiance in the face of the allegations against him, Kavanaugh had “already disqualified himself” and could no longer be a judge.40
The media had not forgotten Michael Avenatti, doing their best to keep his still unspecified charges before the public eye. His client had been fully vetted, he said, and he had spoken to multiple witnesses.41 In a lengthy interview on CNN, Avenatti said Kavanaugh was “lying” about being a virgin.42 Politico called him an “avenging angel,”43 while USA Today reported his assertion that the as yet unrevealed accuser was “100 percent credible.”44 Not everyone was impressed by Avenatti, however. Grassley’s staffer Mike Davis thought the absurdity of his charges emphasized the injustice of what Kavanaugh was having to endure. He called Avenatti “manna from heaven.”