Democrats push second round of sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh
By
Eric London
25 September 2018
The Democratic Party escalated its efforts to delay the confirmation of President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh after Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer published new allegations of sexual assault against the circuit court judge in the New Yorker on Sunday night.
The new accusation, following allegations against Kavanaugh by Christine Blasey Ford, has been made by Deborah Ramirez, who asserts that Kavanaugh thrust his genitals at her face during a party when the two were in college in the early 1980s.
There are indications that the publication of the second set of accusations has backfired on the Democrats. Farrow and Mayer’s reporting has been subject to widespread criticism and handled with an unusual degree of skepticism by the national evening news programs.
In a statement from the Senate floor, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced that the New York Times refused to publish Ramirez’s allegation. A Times article yesterday included the following paragraph about the accusation:
“The Times had interviewed several dozen people over the past week in an attempt to corroborate her story, and could find no one with firsthand knowledge. Ms. Ramirez herself contacted former Yale classmates asking if they recalled the incident and told some of them that she could not be certain Mr. Kavanaugh was the one who exposed himself.”
The Republicans and the Trump administration have capitalized on skepticism over the second allegation to call for a rapid vote to confirm the arch-reactionary judge. In another demonstration of the degraded level of bourgeois politics in America, Kavanaugh appeared on Fox News last night to declare that he was…