In a Culture of Privilege and Alcohol at Yale, Her World Converged With Kavanaugh's
By Stephanie Saul, Robin Pogrebin, Mike McIntire and Ben Protess
Sept. 25, 2018
-snip-
The allegation by Ms. Ramirez, also 53, stems from an incident she said occurred during the 1983-84 school year, when she and Judge Kavanaugh were freshmen.
Like most first-year students, they lived on Old Campus, a quadrangle of Gothic architecture on the Yale grounds. Their social circles included mutual friends. But they came from worlds apart. Ms. Ramirez arrived at the rarefied halls of Yale from Shelton, Conn., a town just 30 minutes away, the daughter of a telephone company lineman and a medical technician. She attended a coed Catholic high school, St. Joseph, that was predominantly white but had a number of minority students, including Ms. Ramirez, whose father was Puerto Rican.
She worked on the high school paper, belonged to a literary club and was a shy but “brilliant student,” remembered a friend, Dana DeTullio Bauro. “We were not surprised at all that she went to Yale.”
At college, Ms. Ramirez put in long hours working at a residential dining hall and cleaning dorm rooms ahead of class reunions, common jobs for students who had to scrape together money for tuition. Fellow student dining hall employees described her as sweet, sunny and hard-working. Jo Miller, one of those students, said she “was a very energetic, very smiley woman.”
She had been a cheerleader her freshman year, played intramural softball and water polo, and served on her residential college’s student council.
But she saw herself as an outsider at Yale, Mr. Roche said, where many of her classmates were wealthier and more traveled. Friends from back then described her as not particularly confident in a place full of other high school standouts. Ms. Ramirez declined to be interviewed for this article, but her lawyer, Stan Garnett, noted that “she did not come from race or class privilege or have the advantage other students had when entering the university.”
-snip-
more
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/25/us/politics/deborah-ramirez-brett-kavanaugh-allegations.html