Kavanaugh: 'This is ridiculous and from the twilight zone'
Judge Kavanaugh responds to the latest allegations from a third accuser.
Those trying to keep Judge Brett Kavanaugh off the Supreme Court would have you believe that the women who support his confirmation by the Senate – despite unsubstantiated allegations of sexual misconduct over three decades old – are conservative activists bent on overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide. They're wrong about me.
I support Judge Kavanaugh's confirmation for unrelated reasons, such as his jurisprudence on deference to administrative agencies. I would love to focus on that and the other important constitutional issues that underpin my belief that he would make a great Supreme Court justice.
Unfortunately, at the moment, Kavanaugh’s supporters – especially the women among them – are not afforded the luxury of discussing substantive issues. So here I am, explaining why, as a woman, the weak allegations against Kavanaugh have not even slightly weakened my support.
Let me be clear: women such as Christine Blasey Ford deserve the right to be heard. They also deserve the right to be heard as soon as possible and in the proper forum. That would have been possible in this case had Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., not circumvented the normal Senate Judiciary Committee process entirely and sat on Ford's allegation for nearly two months.
Instead, Feinstein revealed Ford's letter at the 11th hour, after Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing – the proper forum for airing accusations about him – and after a subsequent round of answers Kavanaugh provided to senators' written questions had ended. Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, could not even get an unredacted copy of the letter until several days ago.
Ford alleges that when she and Kavanaugh were in high school he forced her onto a bed at a party at a home – the location of which she does not remember, on a date she does not remember – got on top of her, groped her and tried unsuccessfully to take off her clothes while he was drunk.
Kavanaugh has said he did not sexually assault Ford or anyone else and was not any the party she described. Other teens who Ford said were at the party have said they do not recall such a gathering, including a boy Ford said witnessed the alleged attack on her. Ford has said she told no one about the attack until 2012 – some 30 years later.
Some of the obstacles to Ford's last-minute testimony raised by her attorneys, Debra Katz and Lisa Banks, lead many to believe that their goal is delay. They claimed that Ford is afraid of flying, until it was revealed that Ford flew to the East Coast this summer. They also claimed that Ford was being subjected to too much pressure and even bullied, despite the fact that Grassley bent over backwards to offer an unprecedented number of options for her testimony.
It is still not clear how in August Ford came to be represented by Katz, an anti-Trump activist and “feared attorney of the #MeToo movement” located on the opposite side of the country. It is suspected – but not proven – that Feinstein or another Democratic senator arranged for the representation. But in any case, if the judicial confirmation process is being driven off a cliff, activist attorneys are at the wheel.
In the case of a more recent allegation, accuser Deborah Ramirez was initially unsure whether the student who allegedly exposed himself to her at a party 35 years ago was Kavanaugh. But after six days of talking to Stan Barnett – a Colorado Democratic attorney who was located with the help of Sen. Michael Bennet D-Colo. – her memory was suddenly clear.
Kavanaugh vehemently denied Ramirez’s claim about his behavior.
Despite initial rejections by multiple news outlets – including The New York Times, which could find no corroborating evidence after interviewing more than a dozen possible witnesses – the attorney shopped Ramirez’s story around until The New Yorker bit.
The magazine reported that Ramirez said the alleged incident occurred while she was playing a drinking game with a small group of other students and she was chosen repeatedly to drink “and quickly became inebriated. … Later, she said, she was on the floor, foggy and slurring her words” when a male student allegedly exposed himself to her.
The New York Times reported on the story, along with many other news organizations, after The New Yorker story was published.
We are supposed to always believe women's stories of sexual misconduct, so Ramirez's story was immediately dubbed “credible” by many. However, those who care about the future of the women’s movement need to realize that if everything is credible, then nothing will be credible. Jumping the shark on uncorroborated but politically convenient accusations severely undermines the credibility of future sexual assault victims.
And in the latest charge, attorney Michael Avenatti – who gained instant fame for representing adult film actress Stormy Daniels, who alleges she had an extramarital affair with Donald Trump in 2006 – said Wednesday that a new client named Julie Swetnick alleges that Kavanaugh was present when she was raped in 1982, but did not explicitly accuse Kavanaugh of assaulting her.
In a statement of the Swetnick charges, Kavanaugh said: “This is ridiculous and from the Twilight Zone. I don’t know who this is and this never happened.”
Avenatti is a strong Democratic partisan and has said he is considering seeking the party’s nomination for president in 2020.
Quietly, many women fear that what is happening to Brett Kavanaugh could happen to their sons, husbands, fathers or brothers. At the same time, they know it is considered nothing short of heretical to draw one’s own conclusions about the Kavanaugh allegations. So, for the most part, these women stay silent.
For me, it is difficult to ignore the hypocrisy in the #MeToo movement's claim to be giving a voice to women while trying to demean or even silence the voices of women who disagree with the movement's opposition to Kavanaugh. Whatever its initial intentions, the movement is now waging war on the ability of women to think critically.
A final tragedy in the attempt to bring down Kavanaugh and the larger weaponization of the #MeToo movement is the manipulation of women's compassion, fears and painful memories for political gain – in this case, blocking President Trump from putting a conservative on the high court.
“If Kavanaugh drops out, we’re halfway there," said Brian Fallon, head of a leading activist group opposing Kavanaugh and a 2016 campaign adviser to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. In service of the goal to keeping Kavanaugh off the Supreme Court, women's emotions have been toyed with and funneled into a feeding frenzy of opposition to his confirmation.
Women have a right to be heard. But they should be heard without inviting the circus into town. Recent events have not strengthened the #MeToo movement; they have put it on life support. The women of America deserve better.
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