When is enough enough?
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A woman has come forward with new allegations about Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, accusing him of inappropriate behavior while he was in high school. The allegations come from Julie Swetnick, who attended Gaithersburg High School in Maryland.
Swetnick says she attended “well over ten” parties where Kavanaugh was present and saw him “drink excessively at many of these parties and engage in abusive and physically aggressive behavior towards girls, including pressing girls against him without their consent, ‘grinding’ against girls and attempting to remove or shift girls’ clothing to expose private body parts. “Swetnick made her allegations in a sworn statement that was given to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Her statement includes a series of other serious allegations that CNN has not yet been able to corroborate.
Even more seriously, she says that Kavanaugh and Judge participated in efforts to “cause girls to become inebriated and disoriented so they could then be ‘gang raped’ in a side room or bedroom by a ‘train’ of numerous boys.” She says that she has a “firm recollection” of individuals including Kavanaugh and Judge “lined up outside rooms at many of these parties waiting for their ‘turn’ with a girl inside the room”—and that in “approximately 1982” she was “the victim of one of these ‘train’ or ‘gang rapes’ where Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh were present.” (She says she believes she was drugged before it took place.)
While Swetnick does not say specifically that Judge and Kavanaugh raped her, only that they were “present,” her declaration severely contradicts Kavanaugh’s claim, made in a Monday Fox News interview, that he had never “saw or heard of” any incident in which multiple male students took advantage of a female student sexually when he was in high school. Judge, who has said that he has “no recollection” of the incident which Christine Blasey Ford alleges took place, published a book in 1997 called Wasted: Tales of a Gen X Drunk that includes a character named “Bart O’Kavanaugh” who becomes drunk and vomits. On Wednesday, Kavanaugh released a calendar he kept in 1982 that includes an apparent reference to drinking with Judge (” ’skis w/Judge”). Republicans have said they do not plan to call Judge as a witness in Kavanaugh’s ongoing confirmation process, which is expected to continue Thursday with Ford’s testimony. (Judge’s attorney has denied Swetnick’s allegation.)