I will always be at least two steps behind the Brett Kavanaugh story. Maybe, as I'm typing this, some reporter is talking to another girl who partied with him before he went off to Yale, or wherever--I know he went to law school at Yale. I want to say, though, that, while he's not my kind of guy, I think I part ways with people who are tweeting things along the line of "I too keep at the ready a list of 65 girls from my high school whom I did not try to rape." The idea is that Kavanaugh's consciousness of guilt accounts for the extremely short lag time between the allegation of an attempted sexual assault leaking into the public domain and the release of a letter signed by 65 women who claim to have known him well enough back in the day to conclude that he was and therefore is a fleshy specimen of that hard working cliché, "a perfect gentleman." Possibly it doesn't occur to hipsters, but a lot of people around Kavanaugh's age (53) are on Facebook, and it doesn't seem impossible to me that 65 of them could be rounded up on very short order.
There are other problems, however. I'm trying to imagine what, had I had gone to Yale Law School and subsequently been nominated by President Marx for the Supreme Court, girls from my high school would say about my character. I don't think they'd say I was a perfect gentleman. I think they'd say, "Who?" Since Kavanaugh attended an all-boys high school, I wonder a little about all these girls who knew him well enough to provide a glowing reference. They didn't get to know him in civics class. Maybe at house parties?
Moreover, you don't need legal training to detect a weakness in the evident logic behind this reference letter with 65 co-authors. The question isn't whether Kavanaugh tried to rape any of them. The question is whether he tried to rape this woman who says he tried to rape her. What do these 65 women know about that? Nothing. If someone is charged with robbing the corner grocery at Elm & Oak, no one cares that all the other grocers in town say the defendant looks like a nice young man to them. I'd expect graduates of Yale Law to concur.
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