Brett Kavanaugh Fit In With the Privileged Kids. She Did Not.

[Judi Lynn]

Deborah Ramirez’s Yale experience says much about the college’s efforts to diversify its student body in the 1980s.



Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh during the announcement of his nomination to the Supreme Court on July, 9, 2018.CreditCreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

By Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly
Ms. Pogrebin and Ms. Kelly are reporters with The Times and authors of the forthcoming book, “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation.”

Sept. 14, 2019

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/sunday-review/brett-kavanaugh-deborah-ramirez-yale.html

(Sorry, I'm out of free articles at the NYT, can't post excerpts, I just discovered. The link is the correct one.)

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. Here's the first four paragraphs, per DU's guidelines:

Deborah Ramirez had the grades to go to Yale in 1983. But she wasn’t prepared for what she’d find there.

A top student in southwestern Connecticut, she studied hard but socialized little. She was raised Catholic and had a sheltered upbringing. In the summers, she worked at Carvel dishing ice cream, commuting in the $500 car she’d bought with babysitting earnings.

At Yale, she encountered students from more worldly backgrounds. Many were affluent and had attended elite private high schools. They also had experience with drinking and sexual behavior that Ms. Ramirez — who had not intended to be intimate with a man until her wedding night — lacked.

During the winter of her freshman year, a drunken dormitory party unsettled her deeply. She and some classmates had been drinking heavily when, she says, a freshman named Brett Kavanaugh pulled down his pants and thrust his penis at her, prompting her to swat it away and inadvertently touch it. Some of the onlookers, who had been passing around a fake penis earlier in the evening, laughed.

[dalton99a]

4. +1

Ms. Ramirez’s story would seem far less damaging to Mr. Kavanaugh’s reputation than those of Dr. Ford, who claimed that he pinned her to a bed, groped her and tried to remove her clothes while covering her mouth.

But while we found Dr. Ford’s allegations credible during a 10-month investigation, Ms. Ramirez’s story could be more fully corroborated. During his Senate testimony, Mr. Kavanaugh said that if the incident Ms. Ramirez described had occurred, it would have been “the talk of campus.” Our reporting suggests that it was.

At least seven people, including Ms. Ramirez’s mother, heard about the Yale incident long before Mr. Kavanaugh was a federal judge. Two of those people were classmates who learned of it just days after the party occurred, suggesting that it was discussed among students at the time.

We also uncovered a previously unreported story about Mr. Kavanaugh in his freshman year that echoes Ms. Ramirez’s allegation. A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student. Mr. Stier, who runs a nonprofit organization in Washington, notified senators and the F.B.I. about this account, but the F.B.I. did not investigate and Mr. Stier has declined to discuss it publicly. (We corroborated the story with two officials who have communicated with Mr. Stier.)

[czarjak]

2. Oh, but to be a Bush and a Trump nominee, huh?

[dlk]

3. It's Also Important to Remember Yale Only Became Co-ed In 1969

Prior to then, Women weren’t welcome there as students. Kavanaugh’s acting out behavior also needs to be viewed through the lens of patriarchy and keeping women subservient. Sexual assault is about power and control, not sex.