I Was a Crime Reporter in Maryland in the Early ’80s. I Never Heard of Teen Gang-Rape Parties
Ken McIntyre / @KenMac55 / October 03, 2018
Ken McIntyre, a 30-year veteran of national and local newspapers, serves as senior editor at The Daily Signal and The Heritage Foundation's Marilyn and Fred Guardabassi Fellow in Media and Public Policy Studies. Send an email to Ken.“Oh, I think everyone in the county remembers these parties,†Julie Swetnick says with a smile during her nationally televised interview.
Um, not me, Julie.
I had my first job as a reporter in Montgomery County, Maryland, at the time Swetnick claims Brett Kavanaugh and other teenage boys routinely were drugging and gang-raping girls at a series of house parties in the county, which adjoins Washington, D.C.
In fact, I worked for the Gaithersburg Gazette, in a newsroom about a mile south of Gaithersburg High School, where Swetnick graduated in 1980. (I was a 1973 graduate of Magruder High, a rival of Gaithersburg High.)
I got a full-time job as a reporter at the widely distributed Gazette after graduating from George Washington University in 1979 and doing an internship there the previous summer. I covered Gaithersburg and Rockville city governments, including the city councils and agencies such as the police departments. (Rockville is the Montgomery County seat.)
I never heard word one about teen parties where girls routinely were sexually assaulted, much less where gang rapes were on the agenda, as Swetnick claims of gatherings attended by Kavanaugh, now President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee.
In late 1981, I became a reporter for the Rockville-based Montgomery Journal, where my first beat was covering county police and crime. I was a committed liberal in those days, but that’s another story. I don’t recall coming across a single report of a gang rape at a crowded party.
However, Swetnick says in her interview with NBC’s Kate Snow that she told her mother and “contacted†the Montgomery County Police Department about a party in 1982 where she says Kavanaugh was present and where she was raped at age 19.
Swetnick’s mother and the one police officer she names are both dead, Snow notes.
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https://www.dailysignal.com/2018/10/03/i-was-a-crime-reporter-in-maryland-in-the-early-80s-i-never-heard-of-teen-gang-rape-parties/
