The Kavanaugh Letters

The story of the nomination of Bret Kavanaugh, and the fate of that nomination, is being told in a series of letters. The first letter that concerns us is now widely known. On the Thursday before the Judiciary Committee was originally set to vote on sending the nomination to the full Senate, Dianne Feinstein revealed that she had a letter from a woman who we now know is Dr Christine Blasey Ford, accusing Kavanaugh of attempting to rape her while they were both in high school. You will notice that I am not willing to mince words here. What Dr Ford describes is not boys fooling around. It is not simply “sexual misconduct”, as I have seen it repeatedly described in the media. That makes it sound like some harmless prank that might have deserved a grounding at the time, but does not disqualify a man from serving as anything 35 years after the fact. No, this was attempted rape, a crime that would have warranted jail time if there had been a conviction. But Dr Ford was alone with the two alleged perpetrators at the time and all had been drinking. Even disregarding the additional personal trauma that bringing charges at the time would have brought, the case was stacked against Dr Ford, in what would have come down to a he said, she said trial. Rapists and attempted rapists are acquitted all the time in these situations, because we as a society choose too often to believe the man, not the woman. Even now, Charles Grassley and the other Republican men on the Judiciary Committee have declared that they believe Kavanaugh over Dr Ford, even though they have yet to hear the testimony.

But I said that this is the story of a series of letters. It is the second letter that interests me the most. Within 24 hours of Feinstein revealing Dr Ford’s letter, the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee released a letter signed by 65 women who have known Bret Kavanaugh since high school, and who vouched for his character and integrity. Now I was not the most popular boy in my high school, but there were far fewer than 65 women who knew me then or now, well enough to make such a claim. So that’s one problem. This letter was vaguely worded, with nothing in it that is specific to Dr Ford’s accusations, and we are asked to believe that it came together in 24 hours. Yet, when Politico, already armed with the names all 65 signees, tried to locate them for interviews, they could only find 10 women. Whoever wrote this letter and arranged for all 65 women to sign it had to start without any names at all. So this letter did not come together in 24 hours. It had to have been prepared well in advance in case it was needed. And why would such a letter, signed only by women, be needed at all? The only answer I can see is that someone on the Judiciary Committee who was determined to make sure Kavanaugh got confirmed knew that Kavanaugh had a problem involving his treatment of women. Kavanaugh was vetted in private by the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, and he was also screened by members of the administration before his nomination. Somebody somewhere in that process had to have learned of an incident or incidents that might come to light, and felt the need to have a letter like this available in case that happened. Whoever it was did not craft the letter specifically as a rebuttal to Dr Ford, because they knew of several possible incidents, and did not know which one or ones they would have to defend against. Sure enough, a second possible “incident”, this one involving sexual harassment instead of attempted rape, has now come to light. The possibility of multiple incidents is also born out by Kavanaugh’s high school yearbook entry. I will not reproduce it here, because it is borderline pornographic when you know how to translate the slang. But the gist of it is that Kavanaugh bragged about his sexual conquests, and he considered the female counterparts in his social scene at the time as disposable objects, to be used once for his gratification, and then forgotten.

To complete the series of letters I referred to at the start of this piece, there was a draft of a letter with 200 signees stating that Dr Ford’s accusation is consistent with what they knew of Bret Kavanaugh’s reputation at the time. And there is the new letter from Deborah Ramirez, who recounts the sexual harassment incident that she says happened when Kavanaugh was a freshman at Yale. But again, I believe it is the second letter that begs the most important questions. Who wrote it, when, and why? Let us have testimony from the 65 signees, addressing these points. The pattern that is emerging is that Kavanaugh mistreats women when he is drunk, so let him discuss his current drinking habits under oath in a public hearing. Grassley keeps saying that his job is to make sure Kavanaugh is confirmed. It is not. His job, and his responsibility to those who elected him, is to conduct fair, thorough, and impartial public hearings to determine if Bret Kavanaugh deserves a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. If Grassley has decided beforehand that he will vote to confirm Kavanaugh no matter what, he and his fellow Republicans on the Judiciary Committee who have made similar statements must recuse themselves from this decision.