The New York Times claimed Saturday that a new accuser witnessed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh committing an act of sexual misconduct as a freshman at Yale University.
The Times‘ Robin Pogrebin & Kate Kelly report, in an article that appears in Sunday’s print edition:
We also uncovered a previously unreported story about Mr. Kavanaugh in his freshman year that echoes Ms. [Deborah] Ramirez’s allegation. A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student. Mr. Stier, who runs a nonprofit organization in Washington, notified senators and the F.B.I. about this account, but the F.B.I. did not investigate and Mr. Stier has declined to discuss it publicly. (We corroborated the story with two officials who have communicated with Mr. Stier.)
The Times‘ story, HuffPost reports, was marred somewhat by a tweet sent by the Times‘s Twitter account to promote the story that claimed: “Having a penis thrust in your face at a drunken dorm party may seem like harmless fun.”
The Times deleted the tweet and apologized.
During his Senate confirmation hearings last fall, Kavanaugh faced a sudden avalanche of accusations, many outlandish and none proven or provable, dating from his high school and college days.
Liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has praised her new colleague for hiring the first all-female staff of law clerks.
Update: President Donald Trump tweeted about the article Sunday morning:
Mollie Hemingway, a senior editor at The Federalist who has written her own book on the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, tweeted Sunday that the Times reporters’ own book contradicts the claim in the article because the alleged victim does not recall the event.
Pogrebin and Kellys book is called The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation. Hemingway’s book is called Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.