In the summer of 1982, Brett Kavanaugh kept a calendar. Now, those faded, green-fringed pages scrawled with a teenager’s notes on basketball practice, movies and, yes, parties will be scrutinized by senators, media, and the public. For all of its entries, though, nothing on the calendar proves or disproves that Kavanaugh attended a specific party or what happened during that party. Instead of leaving it at that, an imperfect document from the past, both Kavanuagh’s supporters and critics can and will read into in what they want.
Judge Kavanaugh’s 1982 calendar, submitted to Senate Judiciary Committee pic.twitter.com/VxzMQvgxNE
— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) September 26, 2018
For his supporters, those pages show that Kavanaugh was gone much of the summer and seems to have been more focused on sports than anything else. Those pages also show that he did keep notes on parties, games and sometimes, who went to the parties he attended. That easily becomes an argument in his defense: if he’d been at a party with Christine Blasey Ford, which he probably wasn’t because he was gone or playing sports much of the time, he would have noted it. Since it’s not there, well, like he said, it must not have happened.
For Kavanuagh’s critics, the calendar has a different message. He was a high school partier — and he partied a lot. So much partying, in fact, that he missed his own father’s birthday for “beach week,” which seems to have been a weeklong, end-of-school party. The calendar also doesn’t specifically back up Kavanaugh’s Fox News interview claims of spending lots of time going to religious services or doing service work. There at least aren’t any mentions of either in his calendar that summer.
This can easily become an argument against him: He liked parties in high school, he misrepresented his typical routine in the interview with Fox News. It’s a stretch from there perhaps, but the Democrats’ conclusion so far even without this calendar has been that Kavanaugh’s enjoyment of alcohol and parties suggests the assault did happen and is consistent with his character.
The problem with both of these narratives, of course, is that Kavanaugh’s calendar neither proves or disproves either claim, nor answers the one question that matters: Did Kavanaugh commit sexual assault? Nor can it, because his accuser doesn’t remember when the alleged assault against her occurred.
The calendar simply shows some of what he did that summer, proving only that humans will always see only what they want to see.
[New: New Kavanaugh accuser says he was present when she was gang-raped]
