Brett Kavanaugh's Alleged Accomplice Has Spent Years Trying to Discredit Rape Accusations Online
Over the weekend, Christine Blasey Ford went on the record to accuse Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of attempting to sexually assault her when they were in high school. Since then, Kavanaugh’s relationship with Mark Judge, the high school friend of Kavanaugh’s who Ford alleges was in the room during the incident, has come under scrutiny. In Ford’s account, it was Judge jumping on both of them that allowed her to escape.
Judge is a conservative author who has written for publications like the Daily Caller and American Spectator and published the book Wasted: Tales of a Gen X Drunk, in which he describes his experience as a teenage alcoholic. In her account, Ford alleged that both Judge and Kavanaugh were “stumbling drunk” at the time of the incident. (In the Weekly Standard, Judge denied the alleged events ever took place.) In his book, Judge describes someone named “Bart O’Kavanaugh” puking after drinking too much, according to Mother Jones.
That’s just the beginning of Judge’s checkered history in publishing. The magazine summarized another bit of his illustrious career:
Judge’s more controversial writings include a 2012 Daily Caller column about his bike getting stolen and “the very high odds” the thief was a black man. A piece he wrote in 2006 on PoliticalMavens.com starts out with a incendiary question: “You’re thinking it even if you don’t say it: Are gay people perverts?”
As several journalists on Twitter pointed out, Judge has also spent a significant amount of time questioning other accounts of sexual assault and asserting other deeply gross ideas about sexuality, including suggesting that a clothing choice could incite rape.
He has also, incidentally, written about his massive boner for Sarah Palin.
From there, things just get weirder. Though Judge quickly deleted his social media profiles as attention focused on him in the wake of the allegations, much of it was documented by internet sleuths. They found a YouTube channel that appeared to belong to Judge onto which he uploaded bizarre videos that intercut innocuous visuals of books and cityscapes with sexualized videos of young women. Twitter user TheDiscomfiture screenshotted many of the videos (some of them have been re-uploaded here). A deleted Flickr account users also linked to Judge featured similar images. Other photos that allegedly originated on Judge’s deleted Facebook page featured young girls in bikinis at a resort.
Since the allegations surfaced, Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee and Republican Jeff Flake have called for Kavanaugh’s hearing to be postponed. Even Lindsey Graham said he was open to hearing more about the allegations.
“I agree with Sen. Flake that we should delay this week’s vote,” Sen. Diane Feinstein, one of the people to whom Ford sent her allegations, told NPR. “There’s a lot of information we don’t know and the FBI should have the time it needs to investigate this new material. Staff calls aren’t the appropriate way to handle this.”
Chuck Schumer also called for the vote to be postponed “until, at a very minimum, these serious and credible allegations are thoroughly investigated.”
“To railroad a vote now would be an insult to the women of America and the integrity of the Supreme Court,” he said.
Update, 4:32 p.m. ET: This post has been updated to remove a tweet citing Judge writing about Rolling Stone’s reporting on the UVA rape case, a story which was discredited.