A new article titled, “Here’s What We Found” was published in the Atlantic by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly on Tuesday, September 17th. They are the authors who investigated Justice Brett Kavanaugh and came up empty except for a widely-mocked tale of sexual assault by Brett Kavanaugh in a case without a victim.
The authors believe the accusers of the Justice despite no evidence since they are judging them by their emotional reaction and they say the claims ring true to them. It’s a new theory of jurisprudence — check out their emotional reactions and decide if it rings true, and you don’t need facts. They are using a line they took from Brett’s mother Martha, “Use your common sense,” she’d say. “What rings true? What rings false?”
We doubt Martha meant to condemn a man without evidence and use that as the only measure.
The Federalist reporter Mollie Hemingway found that the two authors got additional major facts wrong, but what does it matter when it rings true? The authors write in The Atlantic:
Using Martha’s [Martha Kavanaugh, Brett’s mother] common-sense test, the claims of Deborah Ramirez, while not proven by witnesses, also ring true to us. Ramirez, who was a Yale classmate of Kavanaugh’s, said he drunkenly thrust his penis at her during a party in their freshman-year dormitory, Lawrance Hall. The people who allegedly witnessed the event—Kavanaugh’s friends Kevin Genda, David Todd, and David White—have kept mum about it. Kavanaugh has denied it. If such an incident had occurred, Kavanaugh said, it would have been the “talk of campus.”
The only problem is their statement is not true. The alleged witnesses did NOT keep mum as Ms. Hemingway says. That’s a major error.
In the original, much-mocked New Yorker article putting forth claims by Ramirez that took her six days to remember, Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer wrote:
One of the male classmates who Ramirez said egged on Kavanaugh denied any memory of the party. ‘I don’t think Brett would flash himself to Debbie, or anyone, for that matter,’ he said. Asked why he thought Ramirez was making the allegation, he responded, ‘I have no idea.’ The other male classmate who Ramirez said was involved in the incident commented, ‘I have zero recollection.’
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In a statement, two of those male classmates who Ramirez alleged were involved in the incident, the wife of a third male student she said was involved, and one other classmate, Dan Murphy, disputed Ramirez’s account of events: ‘We were the people closest to Brett Kavanaugh during his first year at Yale. He was a roommate to some of us, and we spent a great deal of time with him, including in the dorm where this incident allegedly took place. Some of us were also friends with Debbie Ramirez during and after her time at Yale. We can say with confidence that if the incident Debbie alleges ever occurred, we would have seen or heard about it—and we did not. The behavior she describes would be completely out of character for Brett. In addition, some of us knew Debbie long after Yale, and she never described this incident until Brett’s Supreme Court nomination was pending. Editors from the New Yorker contacted some of us because we are the people who would know the truth, and we told them that we never saw or heard about this.’
As Ms. Hemingway notes, there seems to be a pattern of leaving out exculpatory evidence that supports Kavanaugh’s claim that he never sexually assaulted anyone.
The book has the same error. To compound the error, the book quotes the statement on page 140 and page 141, which they characterize as disloyal to Ramirez.
Will Pogrebin and Kelly blame the editors?
Mollie Hemingway patiently awaits The Atlantic correction.
