Brett Kavanaugh's Yale Buddy is Back With This Insane Story of a Fight After a Reggae Show

Brett Kavanaugh’s college buddy Charles (Chad) Ludington has a story to tell. Specifically, this completely wild story about Kavanaugh attempting to fight someone who may or may not have been the lead singer of British reggae band UB40.

Per Bloomberg, emphasis mine, although really I could just bold the entire thing:

Future Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and two fellow Yale University students were in an off-campus bar back in 1985.

They had just come from seeing the English reggae band UB40 at a nearby venue in New Haven, Connecticut, when they saw a man who resembled the lead singer. The man told the trio he wasn’t the singer and brusquely told them to stop looking at him. Kavanaugh couldn’t let the comment pass, according to one of the two friends with Kavanaugh that night.

Kavanaugh first cursed at the man. After the man responded in kind, Kavanaugh threw a beer in his face, said Charles Ludington, a former Yale basketball player who’s now a history professor at North Carolina State University. The act precipitated a brawl that drew in their other friend — Yale basketball star and future NBA player Chris Dudley — and eventually prompted a call to police.

That is the lead to the Bloomberg story, which is based on an interview with Ludington, who first cropped up on Sunday night to share that he thought Kavanaugh pretty much lied about his alcohol use during his hearing with the Senate Judiciary Committee last Thursday.

But wait, let’s unpack this a little more. Kavanaugh was in a bar fight with a man who may or may not have been the lead singer to the reggae band UB40 that eventually involved a future NBA player. For reference, Chris Dudley is the gigantic dude who was casually strolling around the Capitol building during Kavanaugh’s hearing.

According to Bloomberg, Dudley is still a Kavanaugh defender, as the White House referred their reporter back to his earlier statements attesting to the nominee’s character. Ludington had a different experience of hanging out with Kavanaugh.

Per Bloomberg:

“It was sort of a general feature of hanging out with Brett in college,” he said in an interview. “When you’re having beers on a Friday or Saturday night, that was kind of Brett’s shtick. He was aggressive. He was belligerent.

The New York Times has even more information about the incident in the bar, including the fact that Kavanaugh was questioned by New Haven police, although it does appear to confirm that the man Kavanaugh fought was not actually the lead singer of UB40.

Per the Times:

As an undergraduate student at Yale, Brett M. Kavanaugh was involved in an altercation at a local bar during which he was accused of throwing ice on another patron, according to a police report.

The incident, which occurred in September 1985 during Mr. Kavanaugh’s junior year, resulted in Mr. Kavanaugh and four other men being questioned by the New Haven Police Department. Mr. Kavanaugh was not arrested, but the police report stated that a 21-year-old man accused Mr. Kavanaugh of throwing ice on him “for some unknown reason.”

A witness to the fight said that Chris Dudley, a Yale basketball player who is friends with Mr. Kavanaugh, then threw a glass that hit the 21-year-old-man in the ear, according to the police report, which was obtained by The New York Times.

The report said that the victim, Dom Cozzolino, “was bleeding from the right ear” and was later treated at a local hospital. A detective was notified of the incident at 1:20 a.m.

Kavanaugh’s description as a belligerent, aggressive drunk is particularly relevant as the nominee has been accused of sexual assault by multiple women, including Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who says Kavanaugh assaulted her in high school while drinking, and Deborah Ramirez, who says a drunken Kavanaugh exposed himself to her at a party in their freshman dorm at Yale.

The FBI has re-opened Kavanaguh’s original background check and is investigating both Ford and Ramirez’s claims, among others, for the next week.