Frustrated potential witnesses who have been unable to speak with the F.B.I agents conducting the investigation into sexual-assault allegations against Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, have been resorting to sending statements, unsolicited, to the Bureau and to senators, in hopes that they would be seen before the inquiry concluded.
On Monday, President Trump said that the Bureau should be able to interview "anybody they want within reason," but the extent of the constraints placed on the investigating agents by the White House remained unclear.
Late Wednesday night, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced that the F.B.I. probe was over and cleared the way for an important procedural vote on Kavanaugh's nomination to take place on Friday. NBC News reported that dozens of people who said that they had information about Kavanaugh had contacted F.B.I. field offices, but agents had not been permitted to talk to many of them.
Several people interested in speaking to the F.B.I. expressed exasperation in interviews with The New Yorker at what they perceived to be a lack of interest in their accounts.
Deborah Ramirez, one of two women who have accused Kavanaugh of sexual abuse, said in an interview that she had been hopeful that her story would be investigated when two agents drove from Denver to Boulder, Colorado, last weekend to interview her at her lawyer's office. But Ramirez said that she was troubled by what she perceived as a lack of willingness on the part of the Bureau to take steps to substantiate her claims. "I am very alarmed, first, that I was denied an F.B.I. investigation for five days, and then, when one was granted, that it was given on a short timeline and that the people who were key to corroborating my story have not been contacted," Ramirez said. "I feel like I'm being silenced."
Ramirez, a classmate of Kavanaugh's at Yale, says that he exposed himself to her during a drunken dormitory party and thrust his penis in her face, which led to her touching it against her will. Kavanaugh has denied the allegation, along with that of Christine Blasey Ford, a professor from California who said that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a party when they were teen-agers. Several former Yale students who claim to have information regarding the alleged incident with Ramirez or about Kavanaugh's behavior at Yale said that they had not been contacted by the F.B.I. Kenneth G. Appold was a suitemate of Kavanaugh's at the time of the alleged incident. He had previously spoken to The New Yorker about Ramirez on condition of anonymity, but he said that he is now willing to be identified because he believes that the F.B.I. must thoroughly investigate her allegation. Appold, who is the James Hastings Nichols Professor of Reformation History at Princeton Theological Seminary, said that he first heard about the alleged incident involving Kavanaugh and Ramirez either the night it occurred or a day or two later. Appold said that he was "one-hundred-per-cent certain" that he was told that Kavanaugh was the male student who exposed himself to Ramirez. He said that he never discussed the allegation with Ramirez, whom he said he barely knew in college. But he recalled details—which, he said, an eyewitness described to him at the time—that match Ramirez's memory of what happened. "I can corroborate Debbie's account," he said in an interview. "I believe her, because it matches the same story I heard thirty-five years ago, although the two of us have never talked."
Appold, who won two Fulbright Fellowships, and earned his Ph.D. in religious studies from Yale in 1994, also recalled telling his graduate-school roommate about the incident in 1989 or 1990. That roommate, Michael Wetstone, who is now an architect, confirmed Appold's account and said, "it stood out in our minds because it was a shocking story of transgression." Appold said that he initially asked to remain anonymous because he hoped to make contact first with the classmate who, to the best of his recollection, told him about the party and was an eyewitness to the incident. He said that he had not been able to get any response from that person, despite multiple attempts to do so. The New Yorker reached the classmate, but he said that he had no memory of the incident.
Appold said that he learned about the alleged incident with Ramirez during the winter of the 1983-84 school year. He recalled being told that, during a party in a first-floor common room in Lawrance Hall, Kavanaugh went over to Ramirez, who had been participating in a drinking game, "and opened his pants, and pulled out his penis, and tried to put it in her face." But she waved him away. Appold recalled hearing that Ramirez said something like, "It's not a real penis." He said that the remark made no sense to him at the time, and he understood it only after reading Ramirez's allegation in The New Yorkerand learning that people had been playing pranks with a fake plastic penis at the party.
In an interview with The New Yorker last month, Ramirez said, "I remember a penis being in front of my face," and that "I knew that's not what I wanted, even in that state of mind." She recalled remarking, "That's not a real penis," and that other students were laughing at her confusion and taunting her; one encouraged her to "kiss it."
Appold recalled being "shocked" when he was told of Kavanaugh's alleged behavior. "The person who saw it was taken aback by what he had seen," too, he said. Appold added, "It was a disturbing thing. I think everyone recognized that a line had been crossed here."
Looking back, Appold said, "The thing I ask myself is, why didn't anybody do anything about it? Why didn't anybody report it?" But, he added, "The times were different then. Today, I'm an educator, and if something like this happened, I'd know exactly where to go to the Title IX people. But back then there was no place to report these uncomfortable things—we tried to forget about them." Kavanaugh has argued that, if he had behaved as Ramirez described, the whole campus would have talked about it, but Appold said that, to the contrary, "It was more like, 'Don't talk about it.' "
Appold said that he did not initially oppose Kavanaugh's nomination for the Supreme Court. Since he had not witnessed the alleged misconduct himself, Appold said, he had not been sure whether to regard it as an assault, in legal terms, or as something less serious, although he saw it as "morally wrong, either way." After seeing Kavanaugh's blanket denials of Ford and Ramirez's allegations, and his assertions of his rectitude during his high-school and college years, Appold said, "I had concerns that there was a good chance he wasn't telling the truth." He was certain, he said, that "what he said about drinking was not accurate."
Beth Wilkinson, Kavanaugh's attorney, said, "There is no new information here. The Judge stands by his denial." The F.B.I. declined to comment on its investigation.
Ramirez said that the F.B.I. agents she spoke to interviewed her in a comprehensive and sensitive manner. Several of their questions appeared to mirror Republican speculation that the allegations against Kavanaugh were coördinated by Democrats or were otherwise politically motivated. (Ramirez said that neither was true.) "They asked me if I'd ever been in touch with Dr. Christine Ford," Ramirez recalled, "and if I knew how reporters got my name." She told the agents that she has never had contact with Ford and began receiving calls from reporters unbidden. Ramirez said that her main concern, after her F.B.I. interview, was that the agents who interviewed her might not be the same ones talking to people who could corroborate her account—she felt that continuity was important. But she had not anticipated that people she believed had relevant information wouldn't even be interviewed. "Being told that these people haven't even been contacted," Ramirez said, "it's very troubling to me."
In addition to Appold, several other former Yale classmates said that they had reached out to the F.B.I. about Kavanaugh but had not received a response. Stephen Kantrowitz, a former Yale classmate, said in a text message that, "No one who lived in Lawrance Hall (so far as I know) has been contacted by the FBI. What a charade."
Two high-school acquaintances of Kavanaugh's have also submitted sworn declarations to senators and to the F.B.I. A classmate of Kavanaugh's at Georgetown Preparatory School, who asked to remain anonymous because of the intensity of the partisan fight over Kavanaugh's nomination, submitted a signed declaration to the F.B.I. after visiting the F.B.I. field office nearest his home, where he was told they didn't do "in-person interviews."
He said that he was hoping to hear something back, but hadn't yet. In his statement, which his attorney also sent to several members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.
He described Kavanaugh as part of a clique of high-school athletes, most of whom were on the football team, who "routinely picked on" less physically fit or popular students. He said that he never witnessed Kavanaugh physically attacking another student, but he recalled him doing "nothing to stop the physical and verbal abuse." Instead, he said, Kavanaugh "stood by and laughed at the victims." Both Ford and Ramirez have said they remembered Kavanaugh laughing during their ordeals. "It was so wrenching for me when I heard Dr. Ford mention how they were laughing," the Georgetown Prep classmate said, in a phone interview. "That really, really struck a chord. I can hear him laughing when someone was picked on right now."
In his statement, the classmate also said that he recalled, "on multiple occasions, Brett Kavanaugh counting on his fingers, how many kegs they had over the weekend." The amount that he heard Kavanaugh describe, he said in the statement, "seemed to be an extreme amount of beer drinking for someone to consume at any age, let alone someone in high school." He said that he also recalled Kavanaugh participating in general conversations "where the football players were bragging about their sexual conquests over the prior weekend."
His statement also challenges Kavanaugh's assertion in last week's hearing that he never denigrated a female student named Renate Schroeder, whose married name is Renate Dolphin, and who attended Georgetown's sister school, Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart, in Bethesda, Maryland.
Kavanaugh and thirteen other Georgetown Prep boys described themselves in their high-school yearbook as "Renate Alumnius," which other classmates have told the Times was a crude sexual boast. During his Senate hearing, Kavanaugh said that the reference was an endearment, saying, "she was a great friend of ours. We—a bunch of us went to dances with her. She hung out with us as a group." He said that a "media circus that has been generated by this, though, and reported that it referred to sex. It did not."
But the classmate who submitted the statement said that he heard Kavanaugh "talk about Renate many times," and that "the impression I formed at the time from listening to these conversations where Brett Kavanaugh was present was that Renate was the girl that everyone passed around for sex." The classmate said that "Brett Kavanaugh had made up a rhyme using the REE NATE pronunciation of Renate's name" and sang it in the hallways on the way to class. He recalled the rhyme going, "REE NATE, REE NATE, if you want a date, can't get one until late, and you wanna get laid, you can make it with REE NATE." He said that, while he might not be remembering the rhyme word-for-word, "the substance is 100 percent accurate." He added, "I thought that this was sickening at the time I heard it, and it left an indelible mark in my memory."
Reached for comment, Dolphin noted that she had asked for her name to be removed from a statement signed by female supporters of Kavanaugh's nomination. "If this report is true, I am profoundly hurt," she said, of the account in the affidavit. "I did nothing to deserve this. There is nothing affectionate or respectful in bragging about making sexual conquests that never happened. I am not a political person, but my reputation matters to me and to my family. I would not have signed the letter if I had known about the yearbook references and this affidavit. It is heartbreaking if these guys who acted like my friends in high school were saying these nasty, false things about me behind my back."
Angela Walker, who was in Dolphin's class at Stone Ridge, also submitted a declaration to the F.B.I. Though she did not mention Dolphin in the declaration, Walker voiced support for her in a phone interview. "It's really horrifying what they did to her," Walker said, "it's a terrible betrayal." She noted, too, that the depiction of Dolphin reported in the classmate's statement "is not the Renate that I knew—it's not possible." Walker's declaration described attending a large house party with Georgetown Prep boys, where, she wrote, "A friend from Prep warned me not to go upstairs, where the bedrooms were, cautioning me that it could be dangerous."
A sworn statement by a former Georgetown Preparatory School classmate of Brett Kavanaugh, obtained by The New Yorker, was reproduced at the New Yorker but cannot be reproduced here.
October 4, 2018 New Yorker
- Jane Mayer has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1995.Read more »
- Ronan Farrow is a contributing writer to The New Yorker and a television anchor and investigative reporter whose work also appears on HBO. He is the author of the book "War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence."Read more
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October 4, 2018
Post Script. 1.Rupert Murdoch helps #TrumpLies, so the WSJ reports "no evidence" in the FBI report. Jane Mayer & Ronan Farrow made clear why -There is no evidence if witnesses aren't heard. #IBelieveChristine #IBelieveDebbie #StopKavanaugh #CallYourSenators (202) 224-3121 and Share this far and wide to #StopKavanaugh
2. Here is the latest tweet from @RonanFarrow
