In fact, the texts themselves are not particularly relevant to the Ramirez investigation. What they do show is Berchem furiously lobbying Yarasavage to speak out against their old friend Kavanaugh. Berchem repeatedly tried to get Yarasavage to change her statement that she did not remember Ramirez’s talking about someone exposing himself to her, or at least remain silent.
Yarasavage said the allegations against Kavanaugh were laughable. She had apparently dated him briefly and described what a gentleman he had been. “Just really hard for me to reconcile any of this,” she wrote. “When I say Brett was vanilla with me, I mean it. He turned his back when I changed in his room.” She added that she didn’t want to hurt either Kavanaugh or Ramirez, but “I know what I know about both people and I can only speak the truth.” She hoped that if she told Ronan Farrow how implausible she found the story, the New Yorker wouldn’t run it.
Yarasavage received a call on Sunday, September 23, from “Brett’s guy”—one of his former clerks—apparently letting her know the New Yorker story was going to run after all. She told Berchem that Kavanaugh asked her to go on the record about the story, and that she was having trouble reaching anyone to speak to at the magazine. Berchem responded by suggesting that Yarasavage not go on record defending Kavanaugh. If Ramirez was telling the truth about Kavanaugh, “maybe that’s why [Ramirez] has had so many issues?” Yarasavage replied that she assumed any issues Ramirez had were with her father, so Berchem tried another tack.
“You know that will kill your friendship,” she wrote. Yarasavage replied, “What friendship? I haven’t spoken to her in 10 years.” Berchem then offered some speculative psychological explanations for why Ramirez had not stayed in touch with Yarasavage, including “your family’s friendship with Brett.”
After Yarasavage repeated that it was “odd that I never heard a word of this,” Berchem replied, “All I am saying is we all figured out how to survive. We had different ways. [Ramirez] does not seem to have survived all that well or particularly strongly. . . . If she is making these allegations now, either she has conviction they happened or she might be crazy. But if it’s the latter, and your commentary publicly makes it worse, would you really want that? . . . Bretz career is on the line. Maybe her life is on the line?” “Just be careful,” she concluded. “There would be no going back.”
The day after the New Yorker story ran, Berchem was back at it with a text reading, “I wish I had told you what to do.” Yarasavage did not respond right away, and in the evening Berchem started in again. This time she speculated that Ramirez’s behavior at the Yarasavage wedding was a result of the alleged exposure years earlier. “You know that at your wedding, she clung to me and [redacted]? Yeh, she was part of the group but not really. She never went near them,” Berchem wrote.
By the end of the exchange, Berchem had resorted to fear. She warned that Yarasavage and her husband would be targeted for personal attacks if they publicly supported Kavanaugh—“you and [redacted] are going to get crushed”—advising her that “you guys have to get prepared” because “[redacted] and others have a goddamne[d] . . . Vendetta.” Later she added, “If he put you up to saying stuff, you should consider disclosing. Don’t be the fall guys for him. Your own life/lives are being impaired.”
Despite all these red flags, the NBC story relied heavily on Berchem’s version of events, paying little attention to the striking differences in the women’s opinions of Ramirez.
It is difficult to overstate the pressure that Yale classmates were under at this time. Yarasavage describes in the texts to Berchem the harassment she and her classmates endured from the press—in particular, her difficulties interacting with Robin Pogrebin, a Yale classmate and New York Times reporter. According to Yarasavage, she called and spoke to her without disclosing she was speaking to her as a reporter, rather than as a friend. Yarasavage also had to consult a lawyer to respond to Pogrebin’s attempts to publish Yarasavage’s photo with Kavanaugh, which the reporter had obtained on Facebook.
Politics had always been the subtext among this group of friends. But when Kavanaugh was nominated to the Court, it felt like political concerns obliterated relationships that had lasted for decades. One classmate and friend of Kavanaugh’s refused to be included on an early letter of support because his jurisprudence might threaten abortion rights. After the allegations came out she went on TV to call him a liar, billing herself as a Republican and college friend of his, an identification the media accepted uncritically.
Despite the media’s credulity, none of these wild allegations ever came close to being proved. But a lack of evidence never seemed to keep them from being taken seriously. A man named Tad Low, the producer of a television show called Pants-Off Dance-Off, alleged that he attended a particularly debauched party at the fraternity Kavanaugh had joined as an undergraduate. Kavanaugh was no longer in college when this party took place. While the accuser admitted he had no evidence Kavanaugh was anywhere near the party, much less participating in any of the objectionable activity, he thought the FBI should dig around in Kavanaugh’s calendars and expressed concern that the FBI hadn’t taken his statements seriously.40
Senator Chris Coons forwarded Mr. Low’s correspondence to Senator Grassley, who wrote a blistering response: “We’ve reached a new level of absurdity with this allegation,” which he called a “guilt-by-association tactic” that deserved “unqualified condemnation.” He asked Coons to consider whether he wanted to waste committee resources with such frivolous letters in the future.41
Senator Lindsey Graham told a protester, “You’ve humiliated this guy enough and there seems to be no bottom for some of you.” The protester said if Kavanaugh would take a polygraph, “This would all be over.”
That was too much for Graham, who retorted, “Why don’t we dunk him in water and see if he floats?”42
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Mrs. Collins Goes to Washington
“Their goalposts keep shifting. But their goal hasn’t moved an inch,” said Mitch McConnell as he took to the Senate floor to denounce desperate attempts to sink Kavanaugh’s nomination.1 The effort to obstruct Kavanaugh’s confirmation had started with preposterous demands for documentation and progressed to last-minute sexual assault allegations by accusers who supposedly couldn’t fly to Washington, followed by new hearings to evaluate those allegations, which then required a supplementary FBI investigation. Then there were more increasingly outrageous allegations.
The public mood was shifting as well. Despite Kavanaugh’s conviction on all charges by the media, elected officials were facing pressure to vote for confirmation, and the public was showing signs of exasperation. Republicans were livid over the delays and obstruction.
At a rally in Mississippi, President Trump did the unthinkable: he made fun of Ford’s testimony, to which the media had ascribed almost biblical authority and which Kavanaugh’s defenders were terrified to attack directly. “Thirty-six years ago this happened. I had one beer, right? I had one beer,” the president joked. “How did you get home? I don’t remember. How’d you get there? I don’t remember. Where is the place? I don’t remember. But I had one beer. That’s the only thing I remember.”2 The press was predictably appalled at his off-teleprompter remarks,3 as was Senator Ben Sasse, who denounced the president on the Senate floor in an eighteen-minute speech about the #MeToo movement: “His mockery of Dr. Ford last night in Mississippi was wrong—but it doesn’t really surprise anyone. It’s who he is.” He added that he had previously urged the president to nominate someone other than Kavanaugh. “I urged the president to nominate a woman.” Nevertheless, it was clear that at this point, the president’s challenge to Ford’s credibility resonated with many Americans.