As if readers didn’t have enough reasons already to distrust the New Yorker’s extraordinarily shoddy “scoop” detailing allegations that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh exposed himself during a drinking game in college.
One of the story’s authors, Jane Mayer, scrambled Tuesday to highlight an equally dubious allegation leveled by a man who claims to have roomed with the judge at Yale.
Kavanaugh appeared Monday evening in a pretaped interview on Fox News to respond to the allegations brought against him by two separate women. Kavanaugh also responded to celebrity attorney Michael Avenatti’s allegation that when the judge was in high school he headed a gang of violent rapists. In response to Avenatti’s accusation, Kavanaugh claimed Monday that he never even had sexual intercourse (or “anything close to” it, he added, perhaps mindful of the classic Bill Clinton dodge on this topic) until “many years” after he graduated from college.
Enter Kavanaugh’s alleged freshman roommate, Steve Kantrowitz, who tweeted Tuesday, “Perhaps Brett Kavanaugh was a virgin for many years after high school. But he claimed otherwise in a conversation with me during our freshman year in Lawrance Hall at Yale, in the living room of my suite.”
For New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer, who co-authored with Ronan Farrow the initial report alleging Kavanaugh exposed himself, Kantrowitz’s unsubstantiated claim seemed like good material to prop up her thinly sourced contribution to the overall campaign to scuttle the judge’s Supreme Court confirmation.
“Another Yale Classmate Rebuts Kavanaugh: was he lying then, or last night on Fox? This classmate is now an award-winning history professor,” she tweeted Tuesday. “Take Note: Kavanaugh’s credibility is at the crux of his confirmation to the Supreme Court – and a new Yale classmate says on the record Kavanaugh lied in his Fox interview, or to him, about when he lost his virginity.”
First, what does “award-winning history professor” have to do with anything? Have you ever seen a more desperate appeal to authority?
I wasn’t ready to take Kantrowitz at his word, but now that you mention he is an award-winning history professor, well, that changes everything!
Second, Mayer could’ve taken all of two minutes to Google Kantrowitz’s position on Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Had she done this, she would’ve found he’s about as partisan as they come. If her intention is to vindicate her slipshod coverage of the Kavanaugh allegations, leaning on a decidedly partisan activist is a funny way to do it.
“Whatever the facts behind these accusations of sexual assault, his persistent dissembling about his past character — his unwillingness or inability to admit any personal foible or flaw — should disqualify him from the Court,” Kantrowitz tweeted on Sept. 24.
He added, “[T]he first words out of his mouth at his introduction this fall were craven, fact-free sycophancy. Also disqualifying.”
But his opinion is perfectly objective because he is an award-winning history professor.
Some journalists have cried foul this week that Ronan Farrow has been given almost all of the credit for the New Yorker article alleging the second incident of sexual abuse by Kavanaugh. They’ve complained that it’s unfair (and maybe sexist) that Mayer has gone largely uncredited.
They make a great point. She deserves just as much blame for the decision to publish something the New York Times rightly wouldn’t touch.
(h/t Jeryl Bier)
