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The Education of Brett Kavanaugh summary

Name: The Education of Brett Kavanaugh
Rating: 3.9 (17 reviews)
Author: Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly

Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly

An Investigation

3.9 (17 ratings)

29 mins

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Memoirs

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The Education of Brett Kavanaugh
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What’s in it for me? Get a better picture of Brett Kavanaugh’s controversial confirmation process to the Supreme Court.

There’s a good chance you’ve heard about the accusations swirling around Brett Kavanaugh in the summer of 2018. At the time, his confirmation process as a nominee for Supreme Court Justice was being quickly pushed forward by the Trump administration ahead of the midterm elections. What was expected to go more or less smoothly, however, was dramatically interrupted by decades-old allegations of sexual misconduct.

With the political climate in the US having become increasingly polarized, the allegations caused a whirlwind of outrage from both Democrats and Republicans. To cut through the politics and get to the facts behind this story, authors Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly have conducted thorough research and held over 100 interviews with every relevant person they could track down.

Their work shows that the truth often lies not in the extremes, but somewhere in the middle, and it shows that some cases may not have a satisfying ending.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why Kavanaugh’s nomination was so controversial;
why two women felt compelled to go public with their allegations;
why this whole story may have a silver lining.

Brett Kavanaugh’s high school was noted for its Catholicism, sports, drinking and casual misogyny.

In the 1970s, Brett Kavanaugh attended a private elementary school in Maryland called Mater Dei. Founded in 1960, this all-boys Catholic school promoted a very traditional form of manhood. It encouraged boys to grow up to be the kind of men who worked hard, played hard and prayed hard.

Many boys, including Kavanaugh, went on to attend the prestigious Georgetown Prep high school in Rockville, Maryland. This too is an all-boys Catholic school, with prayers said before every class and football game, and mandatory mass. The religious course that every student was required to take included lessons about exorcisms, wherein students listened to audio footage of a possessed child, and received blessings to keep the devil away.

Georgetown Prep was also a jock-centric school, with the most popular boys being members of the football or basketball teams. During his time there, Kavanaugh played football and was a diligent student who often ranked in the top three of his class.

This all helped cement his reputation as one of the school’s elite jocks, whom other students believed to be recipients of unfair special treatment. Often, the non-athletic students would be shoved inside lockers, grabbed and put into headlocks, given humiliating nicknames or subjected to military-style hazing rituals.

Alongside this culture of casual violence at the school, misogyny was also pervasive. Boys received very little sex education and certainly no information on how to socialize with the opposite sex. Some former students now recognize that there was a general attitude that men were the dominant sex and that women were subject to what Georgetown Prep alumni Joe Conaghan called “jocular disdain.”

Signs of this attitude can be seen in the school's underground newspaper at the time, the Unknown Hoya. In an article entitled ‘The Truth About Holton,’ students at the nearby all-girls school, Holton-Arms, were referred to as “the most worthless excuses for human females.”

Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation centers around an incident in 1982.

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.”

Kavanaugh’s college years were reportedly a mix of drinking and studying.

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.

Deborah Ramirez’s accusation centers around an incident at a Yale dorm party.

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.

Kavanaugh’s career after Yale Law School led to a contentious 2018 Supreme Court nomination.

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.

Shortly after Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination in the summer of 2018, accusations of sexual assault became public.

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.

After Ford’s name became public, she delivered a testimony that was generally viewed as impressive and credible.

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.

As Kavanaugh testified, he showed frustration at the process and bitterness over questions about his drinking.

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.

The week-long FBI investigation preceding the vote was controversial from the beginning.

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.

Kavanaugh may have changed a lot since his high school and college days, and there may be a bright side to this story.

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.

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What is The Education of Brett Kavanaugh about?

The Education of Brett Kavanaugh (2019) offers a thorough examination of the events surrounding the confirmation process of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Details around Kavanaugh’s time in high school and college are revealed through interviews with former classmates. The authors also explore the tumultuous political climate at the time of the confirmation process and the toll it took on all of the parties involved.

Who should read The Education of Brett Kavanaugh?

Americans concerned about the legitimacy of government processes
News junkies looking for insight into controversial subjects
Anyone curious about the life of Brett Kavanaugh

About the Author

Robin Pogrebin is a New York Times reporter who’s covered city news and media, and who now works at the Culture Desk, where she investigates the politics at work in our cultural institutions. She’s also worked at ABC News and the New York Observer, and she graduated from Yale University in 1987.

Kate Kelly is a New York Times reporter who covers Wall Street. She’s also the author of Street Fighters (2009), a best-selling book about the recent financial crisis. She previously worked at CNBC, the New York Observer and the Wall Street Journal. She graduated from Columbia University in 1993.

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