The Education of Brett Kavanaugh summary

During Brett Kavanaugh’s time at Georgetown Prep, the Unknown Hoya also kept track of how heavily certain students were drinking. Kavanaugh and his friends were in the 100 Keg Club, in the hopes of drinking that much beer before graduation, and the newspaper would chime in on how close they were to reaching this goal.

Alcohol-fueled parties were often held at the houses of students – especially when parents were away for an evening or weekend. Kavanaugh was already getting a reputation for his love of partying and drinking, as well as being a “prolific puker.”

Blasey was deeply affected by the incident at the house party. When she got home that night, though, she didn’t tell her parents about it. She felt ashamed and was sure her parents would be upset with her for having gone to a party with boys and beer. In fact, it would be some time before she felt she could tell anyone about the traumatic event.

In the next few years, during her final years at high school and her first year at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Blasey’s grades suffered. But things eventually began to improve and she ended up getting a master’s in psychology at Pepperdine University and a doctorate in philosophy and psychology at the University of Southern California. 

In February of 1983, a group of students at Yale started Feb Club, a club dedicated to ensuring that there was a keg party every night of the month to help alleviate the winter blues. And it was around this time that an incident is alleged to have taken place involving Kavanaugh and his classmate Deborah Ramirez.

Ramirez was known to her friends at Yale as having had a very sheltered, working-class childhood in Shelton, Connecticut. Her naivete, and the fact that she was half-Puerto Rican, half-French, made her a target for jokes and pranks among the more aggressive students.

As a graduate student at Yale Law School, Kavanaugh worked as a summer associate for several law firms and began to get clerkship positions with judges in 1989. In 1991, he became a clerk for Judge Alex Kozinski, a well-respected judge at the time, who eventually quit his profession after an outpouring of sexual harassment claims. 

In the 1990s, Kavanaugh became a key member of the team behind Ken Starr, the lawyer who was at the head of the impeachment case against President Bill Clinton. Kavanaugh was known to be interested in the case, feeling Clinton should be held accountable for his moral failure, pushing Starr to be aggressive in his prosecution.

By July 9, 2018, when Brett Kavanaugh was announced as the official nominee for the empty seat on the Supreme Court, Christine Blasey, now Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, had mentioned her assault to a few people. In fact, she’d been seeing a psychiatrist who’d helped her process her fears of flying and enclosed spaces as being related to this incident. And it came up again in couples therapy with her husband when discussing an argument about her wanting to add a second front door to their house.

When Kavanaugh was mentioned as being on the White House shortlist for possible nominees, Ford began to feel it was her civic duty to inform the people making these decisions about her experience. As she explains it, she never wanted to stop Kavanaugh from attaining the position, she only thought the decision-makers had a right to know and consider its relevance.

On September 16, the full details of Ford’s allegation finally become public after she agreed to go on record with the Washington Post. Almost immediately, Ford’s worst nightmare came true as she was inundated with calls, emails and messages. Much of the correspondence was supportive, but some included insults, harassment and death threats. Her work email account was hacked, impersonators appeared online and her family was forced to temporarily relocate while Ford took leave from work at Stanford University.

Meanwhile, the Kavanaugh family also began to receive harassing messages. Brett’s wife Ashley was told, among other horrendous things, that she deserved to be married to a rapist.

Brett Kavanaugh didn’t watch Ford’s testimony. Instead, he continued to prepare for his appearance before the committee. As part of this preparation, he was forced to answer questions he was likely to receive from the committee. These questions were often of a sexual nature, and Kavanaugh was uncomfortable being interrogated in this manner.

Kavanaugh had wanted to testify before the committee the day after the full details of Ford’s account became public, but instead he had to wait, as his family received more and more harassing messages. During this time, more alleged incidents from Kavanaugh’s past emerged, including the story of him exposing himself to Ramirez. Other accusations, including one that Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge routinely participated in gang rapes at high school, came from less credible sources.

Following Kavanaugh’s testimony, people generally held one of two views: either that his display of anger and his political accusations proved him to be unfit for the Supreme Court, or that this was a reasonable response for a wrongfully accused man.

When the time came for the Senate to vote on whether the nomination should proceed, it was proposed that a short FBI investigation should be conducted to follow up on the Ford and Ramirez accounts. The investigation, however, proved to be flawed from the start.

Brett Kavanaugh often mentions that his mother, who worked as a lawyer and a judge, would use family dinners to test out closing statements. When this happened, she often referred to her job as being one of common sense and relying on whether or not something “rings true” or “rings false.”

After conducting interviews with over 100 people related to the case, the authors conclude that the accounts given by Ford and Ramirez ring true, while Kavanaugh’s account of having never drunk to the point of blackout rings false. Ultimately, they believe it’s quite possible that Kavanaugh engaged in terrible drunken behavior in the past but has since put this behind him.