The Brett Kavanaugh news during the past twenty-four hours has been of a cascade of fresh claims against the Supreme Court nominee, alleging separate incidents of sexual assault and aggression from earlier in his life. A woman named Julie Swetnick released a sworn affidavit through her attorney, Michael Avenatti, claiming that she had seen Kavanaugh and his close friend Mark Judge target and drug young women at house parties, in the early nineteen-eighties, so that he and others could take sexual advantage of them. Two anonymous allegations followed: one from a Colorado woman who wrote to Senator Cory Gardner, a Republican of Colorado, that her daughter had been out with Kavanaugh and friends one evening, in 1998, when Kavanaugh shoved a woman he was then dating against a wall, “very aggressively and sexually.” The last came from an anonymous Rhode Island man, who said that a close friend of his had been sexually assaulted on a docked yacht in Newport, in 1985, by two men named “Brett and Mark,” and that he recognized Kavanaugh as “Brett” when the nominee’s high-school photos circulated on the news.
Republican staffers with the Senate Judiciary Committee interviewed Kavanaugh briefly about these allegations this week. “It’s ridiculous,” Kavanaugh said, in denying one of the allegations. “Total ‘Twilight Zone.’ ” (Two men apparently contacted the Senate Judiciary Committee this week to say that they thought that they, rather than Kavanaugh and Judge, might have sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford at that house party in the early eighties, deepening both the shades of twilight of these events and their sad human tragedy). There are reasons to be cautious about the new allegations: the two anonymous accounts are light on detail, and Avenatti has not allowed reporters to scrutinize Swetnick’s story. Witnesses to these alleged attacks will not be called on Thursday, and they may not be extensively discussed. But they exist, unresolved, and they have shaped the emotional atmosphere of the hearing, in which Democrats believe that the Republican majority is silencing sexual-assault victims to protect their nominee, and the Republicans believe that Kavanaugh is the target of an opportunistic smear campaign.
This chaos, and these grievances, and the further mistrust and polarization they imply, could easily have been avoided. Senate Democrats have been calling for the F.B.I. to re-open the background investigation into Kavanaugh so that it might interview witnesses to these alleged events and report to the Senate on its findings. Even a brief professional investigation could helpfully separate the charges that are credible from those that are not. But Republicans refused, perhaps because they did not believe the allegations were credible and perhaps because they wanted to avoid further jeopardy to the nomination. “A con,” President Trump insisted at his press conference on Wednesday, referring to the allegations. The uncertainty over these unresolved allegations is likely to linger after this process concludes, and Kavanaugh is either on the Supreme Court or not. It could have been cleared up. If Kavanaugh is in a “Twilight Zone” scenario, it is one of the Republicans’ own making.