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.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

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