Jeremy Huang

Brett Kavanaugh, a man in his 50s, had been valedictorian of his high school, at Yale College and a star student at Yale Law, had clerked for the Supreme Court, had a top career as an appellate lawyer and federal judge and a pristine reputation, and then a random woman from the town he grew up in claimed he had groped her at a party 35 years earlier when they were in high school. Kavanaugh didn’t try to argue that the incident was consensual. He didn’t claim he remembered things differently than she did. He immediately stated that he had never even met the accuser. Denying ever meeting the accuser is a much stronger claim than merely denying assaulting her, and much easier to refute. After Kavanaugh made this denial, Christine Blasey-Ford no longer had to prove he had sexually assaulted her to scuttle his nomination, she only had to prove that the two of them had attended a party together at which such an assault might have occurred. She was unable to do so. She did not know whose house the alleged assault occurred at. None of the people she claimed attended the party corroborated any aspect of her account. Leland Keyser, a friend of Blasey-Ford’s, who the accuser claimed was at the alleged party, said she recalled no such event and had never met Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh produced a detailed calendar he had kept during the summer Blasey-Ford alleged she was assaulted, which included his whereabouts of every weekend night and listing who he was with. Kavanaugh argued that he could alibi himself and provide witnesses for any night Blasey-Ford claimed she might have been at a party with him. Blasey-Ford responded that she did not know the date of her assault and was not entirely certain it even occurred that year. Instead of being seen as persuasive, Kavanaugh’s calendar was mocked in both mainstream and social media because the reason he kept it was for a drinking contest he was having with his friends. Nearly a decade later, there is still not a single shred of proof or a single witness who will corroborate the claim that Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey-Ford were ever in the same room before she testified at his confirmation hearing. Nonetheless, people like Nick Kristof still claim Kavanaugh was “credibly accused” of sexually assaulting this woman.

My statement on the Virginia Supreme Court’s ruling to overturn a free and fair constitutional amendment referendum to redraw congressional districts in Virginia: