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More Women Are Coming Forward With New Allegations Against Brett Kavanaugh

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Vivian Kane
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Published: Sep 24, 2018 03:50 pm

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Last week, the fight to get Republican senators to take seriously the sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh felt to be at full throttle. Chuck Grassley, the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, seemed to be sticking to the extremely narrow window they set without consulting Dr. Christine Blasey Ford as to when they would accept testimony from her.

Mitch McConnell came right out and said the Republicans’ minds were made up regarding Kavanaugh’s confirmation, testimony be damned. And Donald Trump’s flippant, nasty tweets inspired survivors of sexual assault to speak out on Twitter, sharing the reasons why they didn’t report their experiences.

Because our nonstop political hellscape doesn’t take breaks for weekends, the fight only continued over the weekend. Here’s where we’re at now. (Content warning for sexual assault throughout.)

Dr. Ford has agreed to testify and is scheduled to appear in front of the committee on Thursday. Originally, the committee planned to have Kavanaugh and Ford at the same table during each other’s testimonies. Under the new terms of their agreement, Kavanaugh will not be in the room while Ford is speaking or being questioned.

As for Kavanaugh, he claims to have found calendars from the summer Ford says he attacked her, which don’t show him at the party she describes. Because it’s a totally normal thing to keep your calendars from high school, and to trust that they thoroughly documented every party attended by a teenage boy who was known to brag about his heavy drinking habits.

And this from the man who had trouble providing documentation or recalling details of important events during the first week of his hearing.

Over the weekend, a second woman, Deborah Ramirez, came out with additional allegations against Kavanaugh. Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer of The New Yorker report, “Kavanaugh had exposed himself at a drunken dormitory party, thrust his penis in her face, and caused her to touch it without her consent as she pushed him away.

Ramirez is now calling for the F.B.I. to investigate Kavanaugh’s role in the incident. “I would think an F.B.I. investigation would be warranted,’ she said.” One classmate from Kavanaugh’s social circle described him as being “aggressive and even belligerent” when drunk. Kavanaugh denied the event ever took place.

Now, a third woman (and also possibly a fourth?) is preparing to come forward with more allegations, according to attorney Michael Avenatti.

I’m not the biggest fan of Avenatti. In the past, I’ve found him to be sleazy and opportunistic in his approach to defending victims of sexual abuse. But sleazy and opportunistic are also the exact qualities that make him a good match for taking on the GOP.

Finally, there was another sort of allegation made against Kavanaugh as well, one that’s ostensibly milder but still disturbing. According to an article in The Guardian, a top professor at Yale Law School, who is also a vocal defender of Kavanaugh, told a group of students that it’s “not an accident” that all of Kavanaugh’s female clerks “looked like models.” The professor, Amy Chua, called Kavanaugh a “mentor to women,” and indeed, the majority of his law clerks were women. (Women also make up the majority of law students nationwide, so good on him for doing the bare minimum.)

“Yale provided Kavanaugh with many of the judge’s clerks over the years, and Chua played an outsized role in vetting the clerks who worked for him. But the process made some students deeply uncomfortable,” the article states. “One source said that in at least one case, a law student was so put off by Chua’s advice about how she needed to look, and its implications, that she decided not to pursue a clerkship with Kavanaugh, a powerful member of the judiciary who had a formal role in vetting clerks who served in the US supreme court.”

The article makes sure to clarify that these women weren’t unqualified. But it speaks to a depressing lesson most women and girls are taught early in life: Our appearance is seen by many to be a valid part of our resume. Girls as young as seven report feeling judged on their looks and some studies have linked physical attractiveness in women to higher salaries. For Kavanaugh to engage in appearance-based gender discrimination–even if it is unconscious–should definitely be taken into consideration when assessing his place on the Supreme Court.

In addition to today’s national walkout, protestors have been gathering outside the committee hearing room, as well as at the offices of senators across the country.

(image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

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Image of Vivian Kane
Vivian Kane
Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.
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