Julie Swetnick, the third accuser of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, elaborated Monday night on her allegations stemming from high school parties she attended with him.
“He was a very aggressive, very sloppy, mean drunk,” Swetnick said in an interview with NBC News. “I saw him go up to girls and paw on them, try to, you know, get a little too handsy, touching them in private parts. I saw him try to shift clothing.
“I saw him push girls up against walls,” she continued. “He would pretend to stumble into them. He would push his body against them, grope them.”
She said that he never saw him or his accused accomplice in a separate alleged sexual assault, Mark Judge, actively spiking drinks or participating in gang rapes — two actions she said occurred at the parties and she believes they took part in — but says she saw Kavanaugh give women many cups of the punch and saw Kavanaugh and Judge congregated outside rooms, where she believes they took turns violating incapacitated women.
In her original statement, she said both that she “became aware” that Judge and Kavanaugh were spiking the drinks and also that she “witnessed efforts” by the two to render women at the parties inebriated.
During the NBC interview, Swetnick says that she herself was a victim of drugging and a subsequent gang rape at one of those parties. She can’t guarantee that Kavanaugh was one of her alleged assailants, but says she saw him and Judge hanging out and laughing with other boys in the room when she began to feel disoriented.
Swetnick claims that after the attack, she told her mother and the Montgomery County police. NBC has reportedly requested police records.
Watch part of the interview here:
— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) October 2, 2018
Told police? Does this mean a police report was completed or just referred to an officer who said boys will be boys and moved on, no report in hand?
If there is a police report and she named names … one wonders if that might be enough for Senator Biscuit (R-AZ)
I believe Swetnick. I think the particular challenge she has is that she was from a local public school (Gaithersburg MD) (not a private school) and ended up at parties where a lot of private school folks were and folks from other schools. The age range was big. Her personal connections to people at the parties are limited. Public schools are typically larger in the big suburban counties and people disperse. The connections are not quite as strong. Therefore, she may have trouble producing quality witnesses in the way that Ford and Ramirez have identified. I think she just got caught up in a party circuit that had become the stuff of local urban legend, but she was naive and didn’t realize how bad it was in there.
I do not know if Swetnick will be able to advance her claims very far without added witnesses. But this is something that the FBI would be able to investigate and fill out the picture if they were focused on it.
She has already provided value, as she moved the Overton Window of the types of things that Kavanaugh was capable of doing when she reported her harrowing allegation. That enabled the Democrats to push the envelope on questions to ask Kavanaugh and the media and public believed such questions to be legitimate given all that we had learned about him up to that point.
The other piece of the Kavanaugh story that is coming together is that he always works with a buddy. Mark Judge or Chris Dudley are his two instigators or wingmen. These are people he looks up to and tries to impress. That’s the portrait of an insecure man. I also think Kavanaugh may have sociopathic tendencies which alcohol appears to exacerbate. The previously unreported rape story (the worst allegation of them all imo) also involved a 2nd person to egg Kavanaugh on. We don’t know the date or time, but I speculate that if the story is true, that Chris Dudley or Mark Judge had something to do with it, unless there is a 3rd mentor type that we’re not aware of.
There’s a backstory of how Kavanaugh went from the irascible asshole from Yale to the irascible asshole partisan warrior for Ken Starr. There’s a photo of Ken Starr and his boys and Kavanaugh is standing next to him. Starr viewed Kavanaugh as his hit man, the guy who would bend the rules to get things done for the team. What does Ken Starr know of Kavanaugh’s past? Has he covered up anything for him the way he did at Baylor? I suspect this is an area worth a look.
Love that reference! Imagine, someday there will be nobody in the US who thinks Brett Kavanaugh sitting in judgment of others is a good idea.