Yesterday, I noted the basic persuasiveness of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations against Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh. But due to their initial refusal to recommend an FBI investigation of either her or other women’s accusations against Kavanaugh, GOP senators last week deliberately turned matters into a he said-she said confrontation between Ford and Kavanaugh. So what of the judge’s unequivocal denials of Ford’s claims of sexual assault, freshly delivered with great sweaty dollops of partisan rage, self-pity, and spite? To me, the matter of Kavanaugh’s heavy drinking in high school and college is crucial in determining how we assess this question. If he was indeed a serious drinker, described as “belligerent” when drunk by various classmates, then this increases not only the probability that the events Ford describes did occur, but also the possibility that Kavanaugh has a distorted memory or even blind spot regarding the events. When placed against Dr. Ford’s keenly remembered traumatic memories of that night — particularly her 100% certainty that Kavanaugh was the assailant — the judge’s lack of memory based on heavy drinking begins to appear quite troubling.
This is why it’s so important that Kavanaugh deny such heavy drinking, and why he now finds himself caught up on the perjury front as well, having already testified to only moderate drinking but currently facing an erupting woodwork of naysaying former classmates. This suspicion is only confirmed by the White House’s apparent restriction on the FBI from investigating his drinking as a young man now that some sort of limited investigation is under way.
Of course, Kavanaugh’s capacity to even slightly reasonably deny memory of assaulting Dr. Ford based on (unacknowledged) blackout drinking is a level of plausible deniability laced with sociopathic assholery that should make any civilized person retch. Apart from suggesting some yet-unmade Black Mirror episode in which criminals game future mind-reading tech by erasing memories that might incriminate them, it also suggests that while Kavanaugh might not remember the events, he knows at some level that they could have happened — making his blanket denials self-serving in a way that should be unacceptable for any legitimate Supreme Court Justice. As Talia Lavin observes at the Huffington Post, it is a sort of upside-down immaculate conception argument for this self-proclaimed virgin-until-after-college, and one that uncannily ties into the profound misogyny and immorality of the anti-abortion forces who, alongside the economic royalists, long for his elevation to the highest court in the land. If the rape of Dr. Ford had succeeded — and even some Kavanaugh supporters accept she was indeed assaulted, only by someone other than Kavanaugh — and she had become pregnant, it is a real doozie to consider that this judge and his ilk would have opposed her seeking an abortion to end such an unwanted pregnancy. In this theoretical, we can see the closed circle of a mindset that would allow a woman no control over her own body, either in sexual or reproductive terms, but merely views her as a vessel for any man’s domination.