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.
Grassley’s experience investigating whistle-blower claims made him well-suited to pilot Kavanaugh’s nomination through his committee. The nominations unit handled it first. When the initial allegations were made public, the powerful oversight and investigations unit joined the work. Forty attorneys and law clerks were now deposing witnesses and investigating alleged crimes.
Federal law enforcement officials with years of experience conducting government investigations had been detailed to the committee, where they worked with the committee’s attorneys and investigators to interview witnesses. A court reporter transcribed interviews. Witnesses were also warned that making false statements to Congress is a crime, carrying the same penalties as perjury and lying to the FBI—five years in federal prison.
Working with whistle-blowers requires a high degree of concern for confidentiality, but the committee’s investigators had to warn those they talked to that confidentiality could not be assured. Some members of the committee might not have the same policy on confidentiality, as Senator Booker’s “Spartacus” outburst made clear.
The committee staff interviewed people who knew Kavanaugh and people who knew his accusers, weighing their credibility. All told, they spoke to forty-five persons and collected twenty-five witness statements. Many of those providing testimony in support of Kavanaugh “asked that their names be redacted out of fear that their statements might result in personal or professional retribution or personal physical harm—or even risk the safety and well-being of their families and friends,” according to a Judiciary Committee report on the Kavanaugh confirmation.67
As difficult as Ford’s attorneys had been to work with, Ramirez’s attorneys were even less responsive, rejecting seven attempts by the committee to obtain evidence or statements regarding the allegation. Despite his own lack of cooperation with the committee, Ramirez’s attorney John Clune complained to CNN’s Anderson Cooper that Senate Republicans were “game-playing” with his client’s testimony.68
In a previous confirmation process, a statement like Clune’s might have stood unchallenged. But Mike Davis, Grassley’s chief counsel for nominations, had been unusually open with the media about his correspondence with the accusers’ counsel, so Clune’s own game-playing was also on display.
Within minutes of the publication of Ramirez’s story in the New Yorker, Davis had asked her attorneys for any and all evidence she had to support her allegations. Over the next forty-eight hours, he repeated the committee’s requests for testimony and evidence six times. He also asked Ramirez to speak to investigators or provide a written statement, but she refused to do so.
Even though the attorneys refused to provide evidence, Grassley’s staff still investigated. They interviewed seven witnesses, including James Roche, Ramirez’s friend and Kavanaugh’s freshman roommate at Yale, and other friends and classmates of Ramirez. They also interviewed Kavanaugh in a phone call, during which he denied that the alleged incident ever took place. In later testimony it was revealed that Roche’s relations with Kavanaugh and their third roommate were strained, and sources have suggested that Roche’s drug use was an irritant.