Judge Brett Kavanaugh adamantly denied that he’s ever blacked out from drinking during his sworn testimony on Thursday. But his close high school friend Mark Judge seemed to suggest in a book that Kavanaugh drank heavily during high school.
“I did not drink beer to the point of blacking out,” Kavanaugh declared during his opening statement about his high school drinking.
Later, he insisted he’d never passed out from alcohol.
“No,” he said when asked specifically if he’d ever “passed out” from drinking.
“I’ve gone to sleep, but I’ve never blacked out,” he continued.
Mark Judge, his close friend, seemed to write exactly the opposite in his confessional memoir about his own drinking problems, using what appears to be a thinly veiled reference to Kavanaugh in the book.
“Do you know Bart O’Kavanaugh? I heard he puked in someone’s car the other night,” Judge writes that a girl asked him.
“Yeah, he passed out on his way back from a party,” he replied.
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) later pressed Kavanaugh on this.
“Mark Judge was a friend of ours in high school who developed a very serious drinking problem, an addiction problem, that lasted decades,” Kavanaugh replied, sidestepping the question. “He wrote a book that is a fictionalized book and account.”
When Leahy pressed him again on whether that’s accurate, Kavanaugh replied, “You’d have to ask him.”
Republicans have refused to call Judge to testify at the hearing.
Kavanaugh’s yearbook is also chock full of apparent references to drinking, including the 100 keg club and “Bart, did you boof yet?”
Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified that Kavanaugh and Judge were both visibly inebriated when Kavanaugh assaulted her. His past drinking does not in any way mean he sexually assaulted her. But his account of his past drinking habits does not appear to line up with another account from his friend.
