Brett Kavanaugh’s High School Friend Isn’t Helping the Nominee’s Case

The alleged witness in the Kavanaugh case wrote a memoir about his own schoolboy days as blackout drunk.

President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, after questioning by Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.Alex Brandon/AP Photo

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Earlier this week, reports emerged that Capitol Hill Democrats had a letter from a woman accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct when they were both in high school. The letter, since handed over to the FBI, reportedly describes an incident that allegedly took place in the Washington, DC, area, when Kavanaugh was a student at Georgetown Prep, a tony all-boys school. 

The New Yorker reported the woman wrote in her letter that “during an encounter at a party, Kavanaugh held her down, and that he attempted to force himself on her. She claimed in the letter that Kavanaugh and a classmate of his, both of whom had been drinking, turned up music that was playing in the room to conceal the sound of her protests, and that Kavanaugh covered her mouth with his hand.” Kavanaugh has denied the allegations.

The New York Times reported that the friend the woman alleged was in the room with Kavanaugh was conservative writer Mark Judge, who attended Georgetown Prep with the nominee. On Friday, Judge told the Weekly Standard no such incident took place. “It’s just absolutely nuts,” he said. “I never saw Brett act that way.” 

In his opening statement at his confirmation hearing this month, Kavanaugh referenced his time at the Catholic institution with great reverence: “The motto of my Jesuit high school was ‘Men for others.’‌  I’ve tried to live that creed.”

But the school Judge has described in his books is a very different sort of place. In his 2005 book, God and Man at Georgetown Prep, which is now out of print, Judge apparently paints the school as overrun with gay priests who promote a form of liberalism that wrecks Catholic education. He also describes an institution where alcoholism was rampant, a theme he detailed in his 1997 addiction memoirWasted: Tales of a Gen X Drunk.

That book chronicles Judge’s time as a teenage alcoholic. Like many works of the genre, it devotes a lot of ink to the kinds of debauchery that leads to Alcoholics Anonymous and recovery. While there’s nothing in the book that resembles the incident reportedly described in the private letter given to the FBI, Judge says his own blackout drinking while he and Kavanaugh were Georgetown Prep students “reached the point where once I had the first beer, I found it impossible to stop until I was completely annihilated.”

He describes, for instance, what happened after a night of heavy drinking with friends at a Georgetown bar. “The next thing I knew, I was lying on a bathroom floor. I was curled up in the fetal position with saliva running out of the side of my mouth,” Judge writes, explaining that he had inexplicably woken up inside a nearby Four Seasons Hotel. He writes that he called his mom for help getting home. “I must have come over here and passed out,” he tells her. 

The amount of drinking Judge describes himself undertaking might suggest his memory of those days may not be entirely reliable. 

In Judge’s telling, Georgetown Prep students were forced to do community service, not because of the school’s commitment to the poor, but as a way to try to curtail late-night drinking and Sunday morning hangovers. Judge and his buddies spent a lot of time in the book trying to get laid, but that’s nothing unusual for a story about high school boys.

Judge has changed the names of many people in the book to protect their privacy, and he renames Georgetown Prep as “Loyola Prep.” But Kavanaugh seems to make a cameo. Consider this passage:

Judge, who did not respond to a request for comment, has been published in the Daily Caller, the American Spectator, and other right-wing outlets. He has attacked many journalists in print over the years, including my husband, Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple. (In those posts he has also taken swipes at me, labeling me a “pro-abortion writer for Mother Jones.”) He has frequently taken to the web to criticize the late David Carr, who was the Washington City Paper editor when Judge occasionally freelanced there.

Judge’s more controversial writings include a 2012 Daily Caller column about his bike getting stolen and the “very high odds” the thief was a black man. A piece he wrote in 2006 on PoliticalMavens.com starts out with an incendiary question: “You’re thinking it even if you don’t say it: Are gay people perverts?”

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s final vote on Kavanaugh is scheduled for Thursday. Republicans hope he will be confirmed by the full Senate to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court later this month, before the justices begin considering new cases in October.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate