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Post by maxinquaye on Sept 25, 2018 11:07:05 GMT -5
To be honest, like I said on Twitter, when I heard about him being a virgin, the first thing I thought about was this quite lewd song from the musical Avenue Q. If he breaks into song during the confirmation hearings, if there are any, I expect him to sing this.
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Post by robeiae on Sept 26, 2018 14:19:23 GMT -5
New accuser, Julie Swetnick: www.cnn.com/2018/09/26/politics/julie-swetnick-allegation-kavanaugh/index.htmlShe also says she was a victim of of one of these gang rapes. Her full affidavit is available here. The story is still pretty new, but I have to admit that I've got some serious reservations about it. Again, I think Ford is telling the truth (and frankly, I think that should be enough to get Kavanaugh to withdraw, though he's claiming complete innocence). And I think Ramirez's story could be true, but also could be completely false (either because it's a lie or because Ramirez has--with help--talked herself into believing a tale that she admits she only put together in the last few weeks). But this new one...recurrent gang rapes at high school parties attended by the same people, over and over again? And of all people, why go to Avenatti? That choice speaks poorly of Ms. Swetnick, imo. Or perhaps she went to others who all refused to represent her? That would be even more telling, I think. It also seems like Swetnick was a few years ahead of Kavanaugh in school. Yet, her affidavit has these parties occurring from '81-'83, when she was no longer in high school. The NYT says she graduated high school in 1980. And she says her gang rape took place in 1982, though she had been observing such events in 1981. And then there's another reality here--perhaps unpleasant and sucky, but it should be noted--with respect to Swetnick's age: if she's an adult at high school parties with non-adults, doesn't she bear some culpability for not stepping in or at least reporting these events after the fact? 35 years is way too fucking long to come clean about having witnessed multiple gang rapes, I think Avenatti also made a big deal about Swetnick having security clearance (she's worked for the Federal Government), but I don't see how that factoid has any bearing on this. Seems to me that he's trying to shore up what he knows is a weak story. Yeah, I'm not digging this at all. And I think it may have the unfortunate side effect of casting undeserved doubt at the other accusers' stories.
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Post by Amadan on Sept 26, 2018 15:45:52 GMT -5
The security clearance would be relevant in that she has an even stronger disincentive to commit perjury.
But yeah... I am having a hard time with this one. The timing and the ever-more-salacious emerging details, each accuser telling an even more outrageous story (now we're at "rape parties") is making it hard for me to rein in my skepticism.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 26, 2018 16:53:04 GMT -5
I'm swamped and have an important meeting tomorrow I need to prepare for. I really picked a crap time to plan a visit to my family. I also haven't made up my mind as to the two most recent allegations (have been too busy to ruminate much) -- but then, I've already come to the conclusion that Kavanaugh should not be confirmed, should be investigated, and that they should consider removing him from his current appellate seat, so yeah, it would make him a worse douchebag if they're true, but he's a douchebag regardless IMO.
Anyway. A couple things --
(1) while I don't adore Avenatti by any means and I won't vote for him as president, he strikes me as a good lawyer and someone who knows how to make sure claims don't get buried and pushed aside. I don't see that an accuser hiring him makes her either less credible or less of a good person. You don't hire a lawyer because they're lovable.
(2) I actually don't find it at all weird that some people at a party were three years older than other people at the party. This was totally commonplace in my high school crowd, even when it wasn't at a large party. And large parties -- forget it, we ranged from 15 to 20 all the time, maybe with outliers outside that. I can give names. Very, very common for kids three years apart to date each other in my crowd. I dated a bunch of guys two and three years older than I was when I was 15, as did a lot of girls. One of the boys in my class was dating a senior girl when he was a sophomore. When I got a boyfriend at 15, he was 17. His brothers were 18 and 20. He was tight with them and their friends, and we all hung out. I dunno, maybe we were freaks? I should also note that my friends and I used to crash older kids parties -- including college kids -- fairly regularly when we were 15 and 16. (I got most of my partying out of the way in high school. By the time I got to college, I was mostly sick of it and was pretty sedate. )
If Brett was 16, and the party was thrown by an 18 year old senior, and the senior had friends a year older -- why is that weird? Anyway, it was my high school social life, for whatever it's worth.
(3) I actually don't find it that bizarre that behavior like this wouldn't be reported in the early 80s. Deplorable, yes, but not unbelievable. NONE of the girls I know who were assaulted by peers reported it. First, they were generally deeply ashamed, and often blamed themselves for putting themselves in that position. Moreover, they knew they'd be likely to either get in trouble or experience some ugly social repercussions. Before "me too" it was all too common. And if the boys happened to be popular and the girl wasn't -- well, fuck it, she was probably better off shutting up.
It's also possible the girl drugged and gang raped wouldn't report it (might not even remember it...). If it was a big party with kids from all over, she might not have many (or any) friends there, or friends sober enough to raise a stink (to note, I left my drunk friends at parties more than once when they wouldn't leave and I had to go. Most of the time, they suffered nothing worse than a bad hangover, but at least once, something happened to one of them after I left), and kids who don't know her might not be so eager to call the cops with regard to some anonymous girl, and many might well assume she was willing or "had it coming."
Go watch a 1980s teen movie. Lots of the stuff the metoo movement has us all woke about, people weren't so woke about and it's reflected in those godawful movies. I can't tell you how many guys I had to wrestle with to avoid sexual contact I didn't want when I was a teen. It was commonplace. And if you were a girl and "put yourself in that position", lots of people -- most people -- would say it was at least partly your fault if something happened.
(4) Note that Kavanaugh's Yale roommate says he believes Ramirez and says he often saw Kavanaugh obnoxiously drunk and behaving badly with girls.
(5) Mark Judge's high school girlfriend seems to be indicating that she knows something about the chain sex attacks on drunk girls.
(6) Minimally, Kavanaugh is lying YUUUUGELY about being an innocent, non-drunken, choir boy type. Every word that comes out of him (and doesn't come out of him) makes me think he's hiding shit. If it was small shit, he might not bother.
(7) Did you see that fucking horrible yearbook quote of Kavanaugh's about being a "Renate alumni"? Yeah. He and several of his buddies apparently all claimed to have slept with this girl Renate in high school. Whether he actually slept with Renate or not I don't know or care, but I do care that he apparently was good with bragging about it and smearing her by name as an in-joke in his fucking yearbook.
In other words, I'm actually not having a hard time with these allegations. I am not quite as "I absolutely believe her" as I am with Ford--I'd say I'm open-minded but neutral on the new allegations for the time being-- but my impression is that Kavanaugh was quite the drunken, privileged frat boy, more interested in bonding with his buddies than in respecting the girls who had the misfortune to come in contact with him and his jerky friends. I knew boys like him and Judge. I am guessing he was a party to a lot of gross behavior.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 26, 2018 17:10:27 GMT -5
Just saying...
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Post by michaelw on Sept 26, 2018 17:14:23 GMT -5
(7) Did you see that fucking horrible yearbook quote of his about being a "Renate alumni". Yeah. He and several of his buddies apparently all claimed to have slept with this girl Renate in high school. Whether he actually slept with her or not I don't know or care, but I do care that he apparently was good with bragging about it as an in-joke in his fucking yearbook. Yep. In a cruel twist, Renate was one of the women who signed that letter in support of Kavanaugh, but didn't know about the yearbook until just now apparently. More here: edition.cnn.com/2018/09/24/politics/new-york-times-kavanaugh-renate-high-school-yearbook/index.html
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Post by Deleted on Sept 26, 2018 18:09:14 GMT -5
Another alleged incident:
By the way, if you didn't know, Mark Judge is hiding...
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Post by Amadan on Sept 26, 2018 18:30:05 GMT -5
Well, if true, this will be one of the biggest scalps collected yet by the #MeToo movement. And deservedly so. It just sounds like something out of a melodrama... you pull one thread and suddenly all this stuff comes loose. If it were fiction, I'd be complaining about testing my suspension of disbelief.
If it's all true, then Kavanaugh is not only a scumbag but a fucking idiot. Or maybe what Christine said earlier is true - some people just don't have a conscience and don't even remember what scumbags they were.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 26, 2018 20:54:33 GMT -5
I think it's not so much he's an idiot as that he thought he was untouchable-- privileged in the extreme. I think, too, he's mentally whitewashed his past and failed to see some incidents from the point of view of the victims. Also, it seems he's a mean drunk (and quite possibly one who doesn't remember everything he did).
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Post by Optimus on Sept 26, 2018 21:45:43 GMT -5
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Post by Deleted on Sept 27, 2018 6:58:35 GMT -5
The fact she threatened him, even if true (I must say that reading the quotes from the boyfriend in the article doesn fill me with confidence in him) doesn't mean she wasn't the victim of a sexual assault and doesn't mean the gang sex attacks didn't happen.
Taking that aside --
She's willing to testify under oath. Judge's ex girlfriend also says she knows of a gang assault of a drunken woman by this group of boys, so there is some backup for what she claims.
He just picked up the phone and called a reporter, who doesn't seem to have looked into it. Avenatti says that the boyfriend was the one who victimized her, not vice versa.
I'll wait before assessing anyone's credibility in this situation.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 27, 2018 8:27:15 GMT -5
Not a sexual assault, but...
I don't need to be certain that each and every one of the allegations out there is true to feel that the guy shouldn't be confirmed.
A non-lawyer friend of mine asked why this stuff didn't come up when Kavanaugh was vetted for his current seat. It could have been slipshod vetting (seriously, you should have seen the stuff they were asking my friends about!), but it also could have been that his accusers simply didn't raise them at that time. First, mon-lawyers typically don't pay that much attention to judicial nominees and hearings unless it is the Supreme Court. (Hey, I pay pretty close attention to these things, yet I'm betting at least one or two folks I knew in law school got a District Court seat somewhere and it escaped my attention.) Thus, the accusers may not have even known he was up for that seat until he was confirmed. Second, many (very wrongly, IMO) seem to feel it just doesn't matter that much unless it is the Supreme Court -- or at least not enough to put themselves through the third degree that making such accusations requires. Third, the Georgetown Prep and Yale Old Boys Code of Omerta seems to be a pretty powerful one. His old classmates might not lie for him, but they'd keep silent unless someone else raised the point. Fourth, many of his old buddies/classmates may have some behavior of their own they don't want raised. Make no mistake, if you raise allegations against a Supreme Court nominee, you are probably going to become a target, especially in today's hyper-partisan atmosphere.
This is also why, in answer to a point someone raised on Twitter, a nominee who was previously vetted for a lower court seat gets vetted all over again for a higher court seat.
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Post by robeiae on Sept 27, 2018 8:29:03 GMT -5
(1) while I don't adore Avenatti by any means and I won't vote for him as president, he strikes me as a good lawyer and someone who knows how to make sure claims don't get buried and pushed aside. I don't see that an accuser hiring him makes her either less credible or less of a good person. You don't hire a lawyer because they're lovable. Sleazy people often hire sleazy lawyers. And I don't know what your standard for "good" is, really. Swetnick's story involves a lot of people. Again, gang rapes at multiple parties across a three-year period. That's some seriously heavy stuff. If it were true, there are a lot of people who need to pay the proverbial piper. Yet, all we've got is a two page affidavit that pretty much can't be investigated because it's so lacking in specifics, apart from Swetnick being at some of the same parties as Kavanaugh and Judge. Imo, Avenatti is simply using her to get his name back in the news. I don't know how he found her or she found him, but his involvement suggests--to me--that there's something wrong here. I do find it weird. People home from college might swing by a party to see some friends, for sure, after those first couple of semesters, but after that, no. The lines were there and the people home from college would hit the local college bar scene, not hang out at high school parties. Remember--and this is significant here, I think--this was all pre-1984. Drinking ages--especially for beer and wine--were much lower. Nineteen and Twenty year-olds didn't need fake IDs to go out. Again, repeated gang rapes by the same crowd across years, that's the story Swetnick is telling (and allowing that she--though older than most--kept attending these parties with the gang rapes). I need a lot more than vague details from someone who isn't coming across as very credible, imo. I think Kavanaugh was an entitled jock snot in high school and that this probably carried over to college. I think he and his buddies assumed they were the best thing going and that every woman wanted them, so they felt free to try to help themselves, especially when drunk off their asses. But I also think such people are--unfortunately--fairly common in high school. That reality, however, is a long ways from what amounts to weekly gang rapes where no one every thinks to say anything about them for 30+ years. I think there's a very real chance that Swetnick's tales are going to serve to undermine Ford's, and that would be a real shame.
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Post by robeiae on Sept 27, 2018 8:42:34 GMT -5
And I think McLaughlin has this nailed:
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Post by Deleted on Sept 27, 2018 8:55:41 GMT -5
My high school experience was clearly different from yours. I see other (blue-checked) people on Twitter saying their high school experience was similar to mine -- and noting that especially in the prep school world, it's quite common to have age ranges like that at parties.
Are you saying I'm inventing my experience? It's not a vague recollection. I can name you some 18-20 year olds who regularly were at parties I attended -- and whose parties my friends and I attended. Also, btw, not everyone goes away to college. If you attend college locally, why would you stop hanging with your local younger friends? Why would an 18 year old senior throwing a party not have guests two years older and two years younger than himself (thus having guests 4 and five years apart)? In my set, it happened all the time.
Don't give me "after that, no." That's YOUR experience, not god's truth.
Anyway. Still the case that Kavanaugh's own behavior and that of his supporters does more to convince me of his guilt than anything else.
ETA:
Dean was 20 when I was 15. He attended a local college, and lived on the same street as my boyfriend (then 17) and his older brothers. All the boys were good friends growing up and thereafter. Dean and his buddies often partied with the guys in my boyfriends set. Since my boyfriend and his 18 year old brother were both dating 15 year olds (me and a good friend of mine), and we often brought our classmates out to parties, this meant that often, even at smaller parties but certainly at large ones, there were routinely a range of kids from 15 to 20.
Dean and I became friends in sort of an elder-brother-younger-sister kind of way.
Debbie was 18 when I was 15. She also attended a local college. She'd been dating my boyfriend's oldest brother for a while, during which time we became good friends. We continued to hang out and attend parties together after she broke up with my boyfriend's brother.
Kevin was 19 at this time period. He knew my boyfriend and others in my set via the local yacht club, to which their families both belonged (that group had a very prep-schooly vibe and was its own clique). He had his own place once he turned 18 and that became a yuuuuuuuge party spot when I was a teen. When I was 16, one of Kevin's buddies attempted to maul me in the basement of that house and my boyfriend got in a fight with him. Kevin took his buddy's side (guy claimed I made a pass at him), and after that, we didn't hang with Kevin any more.
I could go on.
If you are wondering why my parents didn't object to this scenario, it might be because my mom was 16 when she started dating my 20-year-old dad, and so it didn't strike them as problematic that some of my friends were a few years older as long as I didn't seem to be getting in trouble and they seemed clean-cut and polite.
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