Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh repeatedly claimed Thursday that he could not have sexually assaulted anyone because he has women friends, which, dear readers, is (of course!) ridiculous.
“One of my closest friends to this day is a woman who was sexually abused and who in the 1990s when we were in our 30s confided in me about the abuse and sought my advice. I was one of the only people she consulted,” he said, several minutes into his angry testimony.
He would like you to know he was friends with women in high school, too.
“When my friends and I spent time together at parties on weekends, it was usually with friends from nearby Catholic all-girls high schools, Stone Ridge, Holy Child, Visitation, Immaculata, Holy Cross,” he said.
He talked more about his female friends in high school after several minutes of weeping about calendars, saying, “One feature of my life that has remained true to the present day is that I’ve always had a lot of close female friends. I’m not talking about girlfriends. I’m talking about friends who are women. That started in high school.”
After several minutes of talking about beer — and how he liked it then, and he still likes it now, but he doesn’t like it too much, and he’s definitely never blacked out from drinking too much, even though sometimes he did drink too much — Kavanaugh addressed a recent New York Times story about a quote in his high school yearbook that said, “Renate Alumnius.”
It is, as the Times wrote, a reference to Renate Schroeder, now Renate Schroeder Dolphin, then a student at an all-girls Catholic high school near Kavanaugh’s. Two of Judge Kavanaugh’s classmates told the Times that mentions of Renate were part of the football players’ “unsubstantiated boasting about their conquests.”
“Many of us went along with the yearbooks at times to the point of absurdity. This past week my friend and I have cringed when we read about it and talked to each other,” Kavanaugh said Thursday. “One thing in particular we were sad about, one of our good — one of our good female friends who we would admire and went to dances with had her name used on the yearbook page with the term ‘alumnus.'”
He continued, saying, “In this circus, the media has determined the team was related to sex. It was not related to sex. She and I never had any sexual interaction at all. So sorry to her for that yearbook reference.”
It may sound trivial, he said, but wanted to apologize to her because one thing he wants to “make sure of in the future is [his] friendship with her.”
Kavanaugh said he never had any sexual interaction with Dolphin, but his lawyer told the Times the two once “shared a brief kiss goodnight” after an event in high school. Dolphin told the Times they never kissed and the yearbook quote — and the insinuation that they had sex — was “horrible, hurtful and simply untrue.”
“I learned about these yearbook pages only a few days ago,” Dolphin said in a statement. “I don’t know what ‘Renate Alumnus’ actually means. I can’t begin to comprehend what goes through the minds of 17-year-old boys who write such things, but the insinuation is horrible, hurtful and simply untrue. I pray their daughters are never treated this way. I will have no further comment.”
Kavanaugh also referred to letters defending him signed by women he knew in high school and college.
“Most were varsity athletes,” he said of the women he went to college with who signed onto the letter. “They described that I treated them as friends and equals and supported them in their sports at a time when women’s sports was emerging in the wake of Title IX.”
Kavanaugh publicly thanked the women for “all of their texts and emails and support.” Through tears, he described a text from a woman friend — “a self-described liberal and feminist” — in which she called him a good man, and two more texts from two more woman friends from college supporting him.
“As I said in my opening statement the last time I was with you, cherish your friends, look out for your friends, lift up your friends, love your friends,” he said. “I felt that love more over the last two weeks than I ever have in my life. I thank all my friends. I love all my friends.”
Just before Kavanaugh testified Thursday, one of the three women who have accused him publicly testified under oath about the time she says he attempted to rape her at a “gathering” in high school.
Christine Blasey Ford said, both in an interview with The Washington Post earlier this month and during her testimony on Thursday, that Kavanaugh forced himself on her, groped her over her clothes, and tried to pull off her clothing. When she tried to scream, he then covered her mouth with his hand and turned up the music in the room to muffle her cries.
“I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” she said in the interview, a sentiment she reiterated Thursday.
Two other women have come also forward alleging sexual misconduct against Kavanaugh in recent days. One of the women, Deborah Ramirez, told The New Yorker that, at a party in college, Kavanaugh thrust his penis to her face against her wishes, and another says she was gang raped at a party where Kavanaugh was present.
Though she did not directly implicate Kavanaugh in the rape, she wrote in a sworn affidavit that Kavanaugh was among a group of boys with whom she associated and that he frequently spiked women’s drinks or drugged them in order to rape them. He has denied all charges.