The alleged victim of a previously unreported claim of sexual misconduct by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh does not actually recall the incident — according to the same authors who published the claim Sunday.
The New York Times‘ Robin Pogrebin & Kate Kelly reported Saturday, in an article that appears in Sunday’s print edition:
We also uncovered a previously unreported story about Mr. Kavanaugh in his freshman year that echoes Ms. [Deborah] Ramirez’s allegation. A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student. Mr. Stier, who runs a nonprofit organization in Washington, notified senators and the F.B.I. about this account, but the F.B.I. did not investigate and Mr. Stier has declined to discuss it publicly. (We corroborated the story with two officials who have communicated with Mr. Stier.)
The article was adapted from Pogrebin and Kelly’s new book, The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation.
However, critics soon noted that the book itself refutes the allegation because the alleged victim reportedly does not even recall the event.
Carrie Severino of the conservative Judicial Crisis Network tweeted:
This is the blockbuster “new allegation” against Kavanaugh. Except it’s not actually new. It was shopped to Senate Democrats at the time and they apparently found it impossible to nail down, so they ignored it – the same Senators who found the “rape boat” allegations plausible. pic.twitter.com/0183DKr0q2
— Carrie Severino (@JCNSeverino) September 15, 2019
Neither do Kelly and Pogrebin nail it down. Not only does the alleged victim not confirm the story, she is reported to be denying it.
— Carrie Severino (@JCNSeverino) September 15, 2019
Severino also tweeted that Stier “was a member of Bill Clinton’s defense team back during the Lewinsky investigation.”
Mollie Hemingway, senior editor at The Federalist, added:
NYT Reporters’ essay about a supposed second Yale incident omitted their own book reporting that completely undercuts it: alleged victim denies any memory of it. Journalistically indefensible, though gullible additional reporters are spreading it of course.
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) September 15, 2019
The book notes, quietly, that the woman Max Stier named as having been supposedly victimized by Kavanaugh and friends denies any memory of the alleged event. Seems, I don’t know, significant.
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) September 15, 2019
Hemingway’s own book is called Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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