I was wrong. Actually, Avenatti said that the incident occurred during Kavanaugh's high school years, in Maryland. I apologize for my error, which no doubt arose from the close conjunction of the Ramirez claim and the Avenatti claim.
As most people now know, Maryland's laws on rape differ from the laws in many other states. In the state I now call home, there is no statute of limitations for rape. (Surprisingly enough, many other crimes -- including some that seem rather minor -- also have no statute of limitations. It's not a very forgiving place.)
There is still some question as to whether Avenatti has a case, since his own letter to Congress does not specify that rape occurred. His own wording pointedly leaves open the possibility that a group of boys took advantage of a drunk girl. Such an episode would fall into the category of "Horrible, but technically legal."
We must also deal with the issue of statutory rape. In Maryland, statutory rape requires an age difference of more than four years: A 14 year-old girl may legally have sex with an 18 year-old boy, but not with a 19 year-old boy. (My understand is that a different set of rules govern those under the age of 14.) I strongly doubt that Kavanaugh or his then-associates can be brought up on a statutory rape beef.
So: Does Avenatti have a case? It all comes down to the question of whether his client can plausibly claim rape, as opposed to consensual sex. Avenatti's wording definitely leaves the matter open to doubt. Sorry, but he wrote those words, not me.
Even if consensual, I still think that it is fair to take the incident into consideration when assessing whether Brett Kavanaugh is the sort of man we want on the Supreme Court. As many have noted, Kavanaugh is undergoing a job application, not a criminal trial; a discussion of character is perfectly fair. No-one will ever indict Eric Schneiderman for sexual assault, yet the stories published about him would preclude him from becoming a Supreme Court Justice.
Kavanaugh's Fox News appearance -- in which he claimed to be the archangel Gabriel's goody-goody little brother -- doesn't seem to have done him much good. His Yale classmates are now telling a new version of that old Groucho Marx joke -- "I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin."
Liz Swisher, who described herself as a friend of Kavanaugh in college, said she was shocked that — in an interview focused largely on his high school years and allegations of sexual misconduct — he strongly denied drinking to the point of blacking out.
“Brett was a sloppy drunk, and I know because I drank with him. I watched him drink more than a lot of people. He’d end up slurring his words, stumbling,” said Swisher, a Democrat and chief of the gynecologic oncology division at the University of Washington School of Medicine. “There’s no medical way I can say that he was blacked out. . . . But it’s not credible for him to say that he has had no memory lapses in the nights that he drank to excess.”
Lynne Brookes, who like Swisher was a college roommate of one of the two women now accusing Kavanaugh of misconduct, said the nominee’s comments on Fox did not match the classmate she remembered.A young man in college can be both a heavy drinker and a virgin, but the conjunction is unusual. If Kavanaugh is willing to lie about his drinking, he is no doubt willing to lie about other matters.
“He’s trying to paint himself as some kind of choir boy,” said Brookes, a Republican and former pharmaceutical executive who recalled an encounter with a drunken Kavanaugh at a fraternity event. “You can’t lie your way onto the Supreme Court, and with that statement out, he’s gone too far. It’s about the integrity of that institution.”
If we lived in a just world, the fact that Brett Kavanaugh demonstrably perjured himself on non-sexual matters should be enough to knock him off his bench and land him in jail. Why aren't more people talking about that?
4 comments:
You make a great discovery in this article. Kavanaugh presenting himself as a choir boy could motivate his former classmates to come forward. At this point, it would be interesting to hear what his male classmates thought of him, especially the ones he hung out with.
But then we do fall close to the trap of what to do about boys who were boys back in the late 60's and 70's. Possibly one of the most recent eras with the most discord, rancor, and protestations about everything from the environment to free love to sex and drugs and rock n roll, to sex, not war.
I've already read one account on facebook of s woman who grew up in that time who simply stated, you knew where to hang out, and where not to hang out, and you chose one path or the other. Imagine the primal fear of a respectable young woman being left behind and ignored because she was not "easy". Imagine having one's reputation falsely ruined. Even nowadays, reputations are being ruined among the young by vicious, anonymous social media rumors.
Everybody wants to whack the mole, except that almost everybody was the mole when they were growing up.
A lie too far. Brett Kavanaugh is lying about being a legal drinker when he was a high school senior. Maryland raised the drinking age to 21 effective July 1, 1982 with 18 year olds grandfathered in. Koathanger Kavanaugh was 17 when the law was changed.
A small lie to be sure but a lie none the less. How many others are there?
Personally, I'd rather have a Supreme Court justice who spent the spare hours of his formative years studying at the library and in public service, instead of getting totally shitfaced.
Not Groucho, it was Oscar Levant according to Doris, who said he said, "I knew her before she was a virgin."
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