Kavanaugh was a good friend, a kind and thoughtful man, a hard worker with high standards who nonetheless was committed to living on the “sunrise side of the mountain.” He liked beer and had fun with the rest of the crowd but had a steady, even-keeled personality. He was never the one to make lewd comments about women or brag about sexual conquests. He was always one of the smartest kids in his class but also one of the hardest workers, always ready to help a friend with his homework. It is not his standout personality but his steadiness and loyalty that people remember. It was surely much more interesting and politically useful to paint him as a sloppy drunk groping women at every turn, who somehow ruthlessly climbed to the pinnacle of his profession, willing to steamroll any woman, senator, or ethical norm that stood in his way.
High school, college, and law school friends exchanged stories about the reporters who called looking for dirt. When they replied that the drunken assailant was not the man they had known, in some cases for decades, their accounts were ignored.
“Many recent media articles feature quotes from people who appear to know Kavanaugh barely, if at all,” wrote Mark Perry, a co-clerk and longtime friend, on the day of the confirmation vote. “I’ve known him for almost 30 years, and I’ve spoken on the record to loads of reporters about him, yet I have never been quoted in any story. Is this because I have nothing salacious to say? Whatever the reason, the result is a one-sided and inaccurate depiction.”20
It brings to mind the famous line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”21 Time and again, when a reporter was faced with firsthand evidence that Judge Kavanaugh’s reputation as a man of outstanding character was true, he declined to print the story.
Being ignored was perhaps the best that Kavanaugh supporters could hope for. Professor Akhil Amar of Yale Law School provoked the fury of the left by arguing that Kavanaugh was the best possible nominee from the Trump administration.22 The scholar’s arguments were derided in the mainstream press as “crap” and “horses--t” and dismissed as self-serving elitist back-scratching.23 Amar backtracked somewhat on his support after the allegations broke, calling for some investigation of Ford’s claims while noting that his opinion about Kavanaugh’s legal abilities remained unchanged.24
After the confirmation, Senator Susan Collins continued to receive hate mail and threats, including to her family. On October 15, as she was traveling home from Washington, her husband texted her a photo of himself in full hazmat gear. An envelope addressed to him had contained a letter that purported to be infused with ricin. By the time Collins finished her stressful two-hour drive from Portland, her street was blocked off with yellow crime scene tape and her home taken over by the local police and fire department, the FBI, and the army’s weapons of mass destruction unit. The house was quarantined, including their black lab puppy. Their neighbors rushed to their aid, and a local Chinese restaurant and a Wendy’s tried to figure out how to break the blockade and get their favorite meals to them. Collins saw a silver lining: it had provided an excellent drill for the first responders and nobody got hurt. A few days later another envelope was sent to her home labeled “anthrax.”25 Postal inspectors intercepted it and, after determining it contained cornstarch, were able to trace it to the sender, who was charged with sending threatening communications.
Women who attested to Kavanaugh’s character in high school lost friends. Many had to drop off of social media during the confirmation process. All lost a degree of privacy and peace when their names were made public, and reporters hounded them for information about the judge.
Joel Kaplan, a vice president of global public policy for Facebook in Washington, D.C., faced a revolt in his workplace over his desire to support his longtime friend. Kaplan and Kavanaugh and their future wives had worked together in the Bush administration, and the families had remained close—so much so that they would even spend Christmas together. The Kaplans decided to attend the September 27 hearing as a gesture of solidarity. Laura Cox Kaplan held Ashley’s hand. Joel sat behind the judge. He took the day off work and didn’t think to run it by his supervisors because he was there in a personal capacity, standing by a friend during one of his most difficult moments.
When employees at Facebook identified Kaplan in the broadcasts of the hearings, they were outraged. Company message boards were swamped by hundreds of comments, many interpreting his presence at the hearings, implausibly enough, as an implicit endorsement of Kavanaugh by the entire company.
The political atmosphere at Facebook, of course, is monolithically liberal. Just weeks before Kavanaugh’s first hearing, a senior engineer had started the group FB’ers for Political Diversity in protest of the left-wing intolerance that makes Facebook employees “afraid to say anything when they disagree with what’s around them politically.”26 The company had come under scrutiny for such intolerance, and Kaplan was hired as a gesture of political open-mindedness.
Whatever the corporate leadership’s intentions were, Facebook employees did not get the message. They saw Kaplan’s attendance at the hearing as a thumb in the eye of the liberal culture at Facebook. A program manager angrily concluded, “His seat choice was intentional, knowing full well that journalists would identify every public figure appearing behind Kavanaugh. He knew that this would cause outrage internally, but he knew that he couldn’t get fired for it. This was a protest against our culture, and a slap in the face to his fellow employees.”27 Those who sat behind Ford were not subject to such scrutiny, much less attacks.
Other employees interpreted Kaplan’s support for his friend, and even Mark Zuckerberg’s defense of that friendship, as a source of “stress and trauma.”28 A statement by Facebook’s high-profile chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, echoed what seemed to be the universal sentiment at the company: “As a woman and someone who cares so deeply about how women are treated, the Kavanaugh issue is deeply upsetting to me—as I know it is to many women and men in our company and around the world.” This implied that the accusations themselves settled the question; the judge’s personal innocence was irrelevant.29 Kaplan’s own apology stopped short of repudiating his friendship but called the episode “deeply painful, both internally and externally.” It was more than many thought he should have to say, but it seemed necessary for a company with the bulk of its workforce in revolt.
Outside the Silicon Valley bubble, many were shocked by the reaction at Facebook, as if Kaplan’s attendance at the hearing was tantamount to the corporation’s endorsement of Kavanaugh. In any case, believing that he was innocent of the accusations was hardly the equivalent of dismissing all complaints about sexual assault. Some Facebook employees and even executives were dismayed by the inability of many of their colleagues—mostly of the “millennial” generation—to deal with a diversity of political opinion. But having learned from Kaplan’s experience with the liberal mobs, they kept their expressions of support private.
Laura Cox Kaplan also drew fire for supporting her friend in the form of nasty messages from strangers, but the response within her professional network was markedly different from her husband’s Silicon Valley experience. She had been more vocal in Kavanaugh’s defense than her husband, having participated in the September press conference of longtime women friends supporting Kavanaugh. Before that press conference, she had notified the many organizations on whose boards she served, aware that her stance could provoke controversy and offering to step down if that happened. She needn’t have bothered—the press conference was ignored by the media. But her colleagues, perhaps because they were from a generation more accustomed to embracing friendships across the aisle, were universally supportive.