Byron York: Did Jane Mayer, Ronan Farrow, and Michael Avenatti give Trump his biggest victory yet?
by Byron York
| October 07, 2018 09:50 AM
A lack of contemporaneous evidence was always the greatest weakness of Christine Ford's allegation that at a high school party in 1982 -- 36 years ago, when she was 15 years old -- a drunken 17 year-old Brett Kavanaugh forced her onto a bed, tried to undress her, and, when she tried to scream, covered her mouth with his hand.
But the second biggest weakness in Ford's story was that it did not appear to fit into any pattern. There were no other allegations that Kavanaugh had done anything similar to anyone else. In the notorious MeToo cases of the past year -- which all involved powerful adult men, like Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose, and not adolescents like the Kavanaugh of 1982 -- the man abused a number of women. It was not something he did just once and then stopped.
But in the case of Kavanaugh, Ford stood alone. Alone, that is, until two stars of the New Yorker -- Ronan Farrow, who wrote key exposes of the MeToo scandal, and Jane Mayer, who was attacking Republican Supreme Court nominees when Farrow was in grade school -- published the story of Deborah Ramirez. Ramirez claimed that sometime during the 1983-1984 academic year at Yale, when both she and Kavanaugh were 18 year-old freshmen, there was a small dorm-room party at which Ramirez -- drunk, 'on the floor, foggy and slurring her words' -- remembered Kavanaugh exposing himself to her.
more
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/byron-york-did-jane-mayer-ronan-farrow-and-michael-avenatti-give-trump-his-biggest-victory-yet
