More than five years after he was accused of helping Brett Kavanaugh sexually assault Christine Blasey Ford at a high school drinking party, Mark Judge still puzzles over how she came to target him and the now-Supreme Court Justice over the decades-old incident.
Perhaps Ms. Ford, a psychology professor and researcher, conjured up a memory that confused the duo with two other teenagers, Mr. Judge speculated. Or, he theorized, her left-leaning politics may have motivated her to piece together the assault story to block Mr. Kavanaugh from reaching the Supreme Court, where he later voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion.
“The only thing I’m sure about,” Mr. Judge said, “is it wasn’t him.”
Mr. Judge had plenty to say about his old friend, now Justice Kavanaugh, during the September 2018 hearings and FBI investigation into Ms. Ford’s assault claim that gripped the nation nearly six years ago.
But he refused to testify in public at the time, and his on-the-record rebuttals were downplayed in mainstream media coverage because they undermined Ms. Ford’s story, which she laid out at a televised Senate hearing in a bid to derail Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court.
Ms. Ford’s narrative, which came with shifting dates and missing critical details, began at a party in a suburban Washington home in 1982 when she was 15 years old. Ms. Ford claims Mr. Judge and Mr. Kavanaugh forced her into a bedroom and onto a bed, where Mr. Kavanaugh jumped on top of her and held his hand over her mouth. Mr. Judge stood by laughing, she said, until he jumped on top of the bed, knocking everyone to the floor and giving Ms. Ford a chance to escape.
“Though the methods through which it happened were far from ideal, I never wavered in my belief that sharing this information was essential,” Ms. Ford wrote in her new memoir, “One Way Back,” which was released last month. “If it had been a different job title on the line than Supreme Court justice, perhaps I would have kept quiet. But I just knew I couldn’t live with myself if every time the Supreme Court was in the news or made a decision that affected the entire country, I had to think, ‘I should have said something.’”
Mr. Judge, 59, an alcoholic beginning in his teenage years who long ago achieved sobriety, answered the FBI’s questions about Ford’s claim about Mr. Kavanaugh and himself in a three-hour interview in October 2018.
His plan was to tell the FBI the truth, no matter what.
“I want to die with a clear conscience and I’ve always been an honest person,” he told The Washington Times. “I’m not a saint, obviously. But I swear to Jesus, had I seen something like this, my heart and my conscience would have said, you simply have to tell the truth. Whether it was horsing around or whether it was an assault or something, just tell the truth because the pain will be so less severe.”
Mr. Kavanaugh, who underwent seven background checks and an FBI investigation in addition to his extended Senate confirmation hearing, was confirmed to the Supreme Court on Oct. 6, 2018, by a vote of 50-48.
In her new memoir, Ms. Ford, 57, describes the trauma she experienced going public with her claim and its aftermath. Losing her private existence as a mother, college professor, and surfer was particularly difficult, she wrote. Hate mail was mixed in among letters of support and encouragement.
Ms Ford was also fêted by millionaires and movie stars following her bombshell congressional testimony and was also rewarded with other celebrity perks.
Nobody rushed to support Mr. Judge, whose mental health suffered from the ordeal. In addition to Ms. Ford’s accusation against him, old classmates and acquaintances were given high-profile platforms to make unsubstantiated claims about his behavior in high school and beyond.
The negative publicity damaged Mr. Judge’s reputation, resulting in the loss of much of the freelance writing work that supported his existence.
He ended up working as a dishwasher at a French restaurant and stocking shelves at Home Depot.
Mr. Judge also wrote a book about the experience, but unlike Ms. Ford, he was never invited to promote it on major cable and broadcast television shows.
The book, “The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi,” was published in 2022. It chronicles how the media, political operatives and opposition researchers conspired to try to force him to lie about Mr. Kavanaugh and say he witnessed the sexual assault Ms. Ford described.
Mr. Judge’s book recounts The Washington Post publishing an article about a man who described what he and Mr. Kavanaugh were like in high school “despite the fact that he had never laid eyes on either one of us.”
CNN parked a news truck outside what they thought was Mr. Judge’s childhood home. It was the wrong address.
“I got threatening phone calls and emails,” Mr. Judge recalls in the book. “Photographs and short videos I had made, some featuring beautiful women and models, were held up as proof that I was a dangerous thought criminal.”
Mr. Judge said he wished Ms. Ford had approached him privately to make her allegation so that he could have asked her details about it. Where was the house? When did it happen? Who was throwing the party? But they never talked privately. In public, Ms. Ford admitted she recalled none of those details but that she was sure Mr. Kavanaugh had tried to rape her while Mr. Judge stood by laughing.
Mr. Judge said he never knew Ms. Ford in high school and believes she may have mined some of the details for her allegation from a book he wrote decades ago chronicling his years of heavy high school drinking.
Had they met privately, Mr. Judge told The Times, he would have had a simple response to her claim: “I don’t remember this. Hand to God and standing before Jesus, I don’t remember this.”
• Susan Ferrechio can be reached at sferrechio@washingtontimes.com.