Brett Kavanaugh: I believe you.
I believe you when you called yourself the “biggest contributor” to the “Beach Week Ralph Club.”
I believe you thought the term for a sexual encounter involving two men and a woman, “Devil’s Triangle,” is so funny to you and your friends that you included it on your yearbook page.
I believe you thought it was funny when you eagerly joined your classmates in making cruel jokes at your friend Renate Schroeder’s expense.
Most of all, I believe you when you’ve said in at least two speeches in recent years that you and your friends are committed to hiding the details of your behavior. “But fortunately, we had a good saying that we’ve held firm to to this day … which is: What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep. I think that’s been a good thing for all of us,” you told students at Catholic University in 2015.
You also told Yale Law School students that you and your friends had a motto for the night that ended with you falling out of a party bus onto the law school steps: “What happens on the bus stays on the bus.”
I know you’re committed to these mottos because you haven’t fessed up to any of the obvious behavior you described at the time. You claimed in testimony under oath that “ralphing” at Beach Week refers to your sensitive stomach, not puking after a night of drinking.
You claimed in your Senate hearing that you never drank so much you forgot any details the next day, though you were a member of the “100 keg club.” (Half a dozen of your friends stepped forward afterward to scoff at your claim.)
You told Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) that the “Devil’s Triangle” is actually a drinking game, not a sexual scenario, as everyone else thinks. You claim you were acting like a friend to Schroeder, even though she was devastated when she learned about your jokes decades later.
Still, Republicans in Congress don’t believe you. They don’t seem to want to see how much you look just like the kind of man Christine Blasey Ford described in her testimony accusing you of attempted rape. She has said you were so drunk the night of the alleged assault that you “pinballed down the stairs.” She said that you and your friend Mark Judge were both involved in her sexual humiliation, and that you laughed about it.
I’ve written before that men like you aren’t alone. There’s an epidemic in this country of not believing men, or downplaying or reinterpreting what they say. Bill Cosby said he liked to drug and assault women for many years, but no one really took him seriously. Louis C.K. built a career telling creepy masturbation jokes, but no one thought that signaled anything about him.
There’s even President Donald Trump, whom you thanked on Friday for continuing to support your nomination to the Supreme Court. Trump was caught on tape joking with an acquaintance about how he likes to touch women against their will.
“You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them,” Trump says on an Access Hollywood tape. “It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”
“Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
Trump and his supporters brushed this all off as “locker room talk,” the kind of stuff men and boys say among themselves but don’t really mean.
It’s understandable to see why some people would not think Trump was being honest, that he was just saying stuff. He’s not so great with the truth.
But luckily, there are other people who can back him up. They’ve come forward to support his original version — including more than a dozen women.
There are people who corroborate your original words, too. After you tried to pass yourself off as a virgin choirboy on Fox News, your old friends came out of the woodwork to laugh and set the record straight. That’s not who you were at all, they say.
Judge, who Ford says was in the room with you during her alleged sexual assault, hasn’t said a substantive word to senators. He seems to be holding to the promise to keep what happened at Georgetown Prep inside Georgetown Prep. He’s said won’t cooperate with the FBI — a big test of his resolve.
As the FBI begins its investigation into allegations that you sexually assaulted women as a young man, it’s going to become tougher for you to lie to cover up the truth. You’ve told us who you are, starting in your yearbook in the 1980s, in 2014 and 2015 speeches, and again last week in a congressional hearing.
It’s time we start taking you at your word. I do.
Sourse: vox.com
