A brand new sexual misconduct allegation has been leveled against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
In a shocking exposé and analysis released late Saturday by the New York Times, one of Kavanaugh’s male classmates at Yale relayed a story in which the eventual judge made apparently unwanted sexual contact with yet another female student during his time there.
Per that report:
We also uncovered a previously unreported story about Mr. Kavanaugh in his freshman year that echoes Ms. Ramirez’s allegation. A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student. Mr. Stier, who runs a nonprofit organization in Washington, notified senators and the F.B.I. about this account, but the F.B.I. did not investigate and Mr. Stier has declined to discuss it publicly. (We corroborated the story with two officials who have communicated with Mr. Stier.)
Commentators quickly took stock of the controversial new addition to the Kavanaugh story line.
Another serious Kavanaugh allegation, one that is not only credible in itself but lends credibility to the other Yale allegation. https://t.co/zXSxNsnh91
— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) September 14, 2019
Jeet Heer, a national affairs correspondent for The Nation, is referring to the sexual assault allegation against Kavanaugh made by Deborah Ramirez.
Ramirez previously accused Kavanaugh of thrusting his penis into her face while she was unaware and inebriated during a drinking game at some point in the 1983-84 academic school year while both her and Kavanaugh were freshmen at Yale University.
According to Ramirez, she was so shocked by Kavanaugh’s alleged exposure that she immediately struggled to extricate herself from the situation and pushed Kavanaugh away–and that at that point, Kavanaugh forced her to touch his penis without her consent.
During Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, he claimed that had such an incident occurred, it would have been “the talk of campus.”
The Times article asserts it was exactly that.
Again that report:
At least seven people, including Ms. Ramirez’s mother, heard about the Yale incident long before Mr. Kavanaugh was a federal judge. Two of those people were classmates who learned of it just days after the party occurred, suggesting that it was discussed among students at the time.
During the one-week interim period between Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing and the vote which placed him on the Supreme Court for life, at least one potential witness–who claimed they could corroborate Ramirez’s story–complained that repeated attempts to contact the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had proven unsuccessful.
The latest Times article suggests the FBI’s investigation was even less thorough than previously imagined.
“Ramirez’s legal team gave the FBI a list of at least 25 individuals who may have had corroborating evidence,” the article explains. “But the FBI interviewed none of them, though we learned many of these potential witnesses tried in vain to reach the FBI on their own.”
Critics widely assumed the White House had interfered with the FBI investigation in an effort to hamstring their efforts into fully investigating the multiple sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh.
Ramirez, through her attorneys, issued an open letter expressing her deep disappointment with how the investigation turned out.
“Fewer than four days [after speaking with FBI agents], however, the FBI apparently has concluded its investigation–without permitting its agents to investigate,” the letter noted. “We are deeply disappointed by this failure. We can only conclude that the FBI–or those controlling its investigation–did not want to learn the truth behind Ms. Ramirez’s allegations.”
UPDATE: The New York Times has added an editors’ note of note.
[image via Michael Reynolds-Pool and Getty Images]
Editor’s note: this story and the headline have been amended post-publication to include additional information and for clarity, respectively.
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