If you weren’t convinced already that the New Yorker’s weekend “scoop” alleging further sexual misconduct by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is trash, a separate New York Times article, as well as subsequent remarks from the authors of the initial New Yorker report, should remove all doubt.
First things first, though. The biggest reason to disregard the New Yorker report is that the story itself suggests the misconduct allegations are bogus.
The new Kavanaugh accuser, Deborah Ramirez, says she is “confident” that Kavanaugh exposed himself during a drinking game when they were classmates at Yale somewhere between 1983 and 1984. She says she didn’t feel “confident” until she “assessed” her memories 30-plus years later and talked it over with a lawyer. Uh-huh.
Further, every person named by Ramirez as being present at the college party says that her story is not true. The only corroborating witness cited by the New Yorker is an anonymous source who claims he once heard a rumor about the supposed misconduct. Lastly, the story’s authors, Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer, concede they never even confirmed that Kavanaugh was at the party.
If these details weren’t reason enough to drop this New Yorker story directly in the trash, the authors’ contradicting versions of how they found their “scoop” should be.
Mayer claims the “story came out” after she and Farrow “reached out to” Ramirez . “What happened was, the classmates at Yale were talking to each other about it. They were e-mailing about it, we have seen emails back in July before [the first Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford] came forward,” Mayer said Monday in an interview on the Today Show.
She added, “And eventually, the word of it spread. It spread to the Senate, it spread to the media. We, at the ‘New Yorker,’ Ronan Farrow, my partner and co-author on the story reached out to her, and she decided after giving it a very careful consideration for six days, she decided to talk to him about it. That’s how this story came out.”
However, over at ABC News, Farrow said Monday that Ramirez came forward after being approached by Senate Democrats. “She came forward because Senate Democrats came looking for this claim. She did not flag this. This came to the attention of people on the Hill independently, and it has cornered her into an awkward position,” he said. “She said, point-blank, I don’t want to ruin anyone’s life, but she feels this is a serious claim. She considers her own memories credible and she felt it was important to tell her own story before others did for her.”
Okay, so which is it? Did Ramirez come forward because of the New Yorker or because of Senate Democrats? Whose account is truthful? Who is covering for whom?
As if that weren’t bad enough for the New Yorker story’s credibility, the New York Times came out with a separate report Sunday evening that contained the following paragraph:
So there you have it. That should obliterate whatever hope the New Yorker had that its allegations against Brett Kavanaugh would be taken seriously by honest people.
But the key word here, of course, is “honest.”
