Journalist Ronan Farrow said it’s normal and common for alleged victims of sexual misconduct to forget details about these supposed incidents before remembering them years later.
In an interview Monday morning on ABC, Farrow dismissed critics who said a new story he wrote, centering on a second woman accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of past inappropriate behavior, lacks credibility because the woman, Deborah Ramirez, originally did not name Kavanaugh in her accusation.
“I would say that that’s extremely typical of these stories when you’re dealing with trauma, alcohol, many years in between” Farrow said when asked about Ramirez’s sudden recollection. “I think that the more cautious witnesses that I’ve dealt with in cases like this very frequently say I want to take time to decide, I want to talk to other people involved, I want to search myself and make sure that I can affirmatively stand by these claims in the face of what she knew would be a crucible of partisan push back.”
FULL INTERVIEW: @ronanfarrow on the bombshell new allegations from former Yale classmate against Brett Kavanaugh: “It is not accurate to say that those who knew him at the time dispute this.” https://t.co/BbURHAQ6EE pic.twitter.com/pUznAxDdfC
— Good Morning America (@GMA) September 24, 2018
Farrow reported the details on Ramirez’s claim Sunday night in New Yorker magazine, just days before Kavanaugh is set to testify against another woman, Christine Ford, who has accused him of attempting to rape her when they were teenagers.
Ramirez said that sometime in the early 1980s, while attending Yale as freshmen, Kavanaugh “had exposed himself at a drunken dormitory party, thrust his penis in her face, and caused her to touch it without her consent as she pushed him away,” according to the story.
Kavanaugh has denied both Ford and Ramirez’s claim, and no witness has corroborated either woman’s account. The New York Times wrote Sunday that it had tried to confirm the story with others, but could not.
“The Times had interviewed several dozen people over the past week in an attempt to corroborate her story, and could find no one with firsthand knowledge,” the Times said. “Ms. Ramirez herself contacted former Yale classmates asking if they recalled the incident and told some of them that she could not be certain Mr. Kavanaugh was the one who exposed himself.”
