At this point I’m seriously considering challenging Marty Baron to a duel. There’s probably no other way to get him to acknowledge his dishonesty and the lies of the paper he once edited, the Washington Post.

Baron was the editor of the Washington Post from 2012 to 2021. He has written a new memoir titled Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post.

I am mentioned by name in the book. In 2018, I was at the center of a major political storm when a woman named Christine Blasey Ford claimed that I was in the room when she was sexually assaulted by Brett Kavanaugh in 1982, when Brett and I were 17 and in high school. The accusation inflamed the nation and upended my life.

In the five years since it happened, I wrote a long series of articles about the event and last year published a book , The Devil's Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi. 

I have written a lot about this subject — in fact probably too much. It was a traumatizing episode and it’s time to move on. Yet I was amazed at the lack of basic journalistic practice and any sense of honor in Baron’s account of an event in which I was involved. Thus my joke about the duel. If the executive editor of one of the country’s major newspapers pens a memoir detailing an event you were central to, and does not acknowledge the many times you have corrected the record about said event, what recourse is there? Sending Baron to take Journalism 101 at the local community college?

Baron spends a decent chunk of Collision of Power writing about the Kavanaugh nomination. He mentions me by name when he cites a letter that Ford had written saying that Kavanaugh “with the assistance of a friend, Mark G. Judge,” had been involved in her assault. Had Baron read my book or the tens of columns I’ve written, he would know that even something as small as Ford referring to me as “Mark G. Judge” is a tell. Mark G. Judge was a byline I used when I was a younger journalist. That Ford would use it in the letter indicates someone was opposition researching me, not referring to someone they actually know. It’s a small detail, maybe lost in the fact that Ford could not remember the when or where of the alleged attack, but it is something Woodward and Bernstein would have noticed.

Baron does not have the integrity to mention a single article I have written. He does not mention my book. He does, however, heap praise on Emma Brown, the Washington Post reporter who broke the Blasey Ford story. Baron writes: “The Post’s reporter, Emma Brown, had focused single-mindedly on getting the facts right and checking out Ford’s account as best she could under the circumstances at the time.”

This is false. As I reveal in The Devil’s Triangle, Brown first emailed me on July 11, 2018. It was one day after she had interviewed Christine Blasey Ford, who had made her allegation to Brown. Here is Brown’s email to me:

No mention of Ford. No mention of an alleged assault by Kavanaugh in this highly disingenuous email. Although Brown obviously knew about the allegations at this time, all of that was still yet to come out. I was being set up, and Emma Brown was part of the plot.

In the Washington Post piece published by Brown on Sept. 16, 2018, there was also no mention of Leland Keyser. Keyser was the close friend of Ford’s, a woman Ford claimed was present at the party where the alleged assault took place. Brown omitted Keyser from her story. Kimberly Strassel at the Wall Street Journal noticed this , asking, “Why is there no mention of Leland Keyser in the official Post piece? Why didn’t Post reporter Emma Brown mention Keyser, who according to Ford was at the party in question?"

On Sept. 22, almost a week later, the Washington Post answered. From Fox News : “Ford, the Post acknowledged in an article by reporter Emma Brown on Saturday , had told the paper more than a week ago about Keyser and said ‘she did not think Keyser would remember the party because nothing remarkable had happened there, as far as Keyser was aware.’ But the Post did not mention Keyser specifically or Ford's preemptive dismissal of her memory in its original recounting of Ford's allegations , a bombshell story that has threatened to upend Kavanaugh's Supreme Court confirmation. The story mentioned only that ‘Ford named two other teenagers who she said were at the party’ and that [t]hose individuals did not respond to messages on Sunday morning."

So Baron is disingenuous, in fact obdurate, about being wrong here. Ford said Leland Keyser wouldn’t remember the party, and Brown just decided to believe her. She did not mention Keyser at all.

But the truth is Keyser was a disaster for Ford’s credibility. In 2019, Keyser revealed to Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, two reporters for the New York Times, that she did not believe Ford’s story. Further, Keyser said she felt threatened to change her story. “We spoke multiple times to Keyser, who also said that she didn’t recall that get-together or any others like it,” the two New York Times reporters wrote. “In fact, she challenged Ford’s accuracy. ‘I don’t have any confidence in the story.’”

Keyser also claimed she was told that “nasty things” could be said about her if she did not cooperate. Baron, of course, does not mention this attempted extortion. There was also a honey trap set for me, to say nothing of the death threats and harassment.

At the time, Marty Baron’s Washington Post also did a profile of a guy named Mike Sacks. Sacks, a comedy writer, talked to the paper about what it was like growing up outside of Washington, D.C., with Brett and I. There was only one problem. Mike Sacks, by his own admission, has never laid eyes on me, Brett Kavanaugh, or any of our friends. Yes, the Washington Post ran a story detailing the misadventures of me and Brett Kavanaugh in the 1980s, sourced by a man who, by his and the reporter’s own admissions, had never met either one of us.

I could go on. There was also the ridiculous hit piece about, yes, our underground high school newspaper and deep dives into which movies we watched in the 1980s. All of which, of course, was intended to portray Kavanaugh and I as something we were not. We were smeared and set up, and Marty Baron’s paper is largely to blame.

I have written about the nightmare of 2018 a lot. Yes, it’s time to move on. In fact, there is some comfort in Baron’s dissembling. Sometimes you’re forced to conclude a person has no honor and there’s nothing to be done about it.

Democracy dies in dishonor.

Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of  The Devil ’ s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.