Backer Hints Brett Kavanaugh May Claim ‘Rough Horse Play’ Defense

With Monday’s scheduled Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on a attempted rape allegation against Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh now in doubt, according to a CNN report, a leading supporter of Kavanaugh’s nomination appeared to plant a hint that the 53-year-old federal judge may soon change his line of defense against the charge. But according to the CNN report, Monday’s hearing at which both Kavanaugh and his accuser were supposed to testify may not happen after all. The Senate Judiciary Committee had scheduled a vote on Kavanaugh’s confirmation for Thursday, but that vote has now been postponed. With the Senate scheduled to adjourn next Tuesday for the remainder of the week, when the vote may occur remains uncertain. Christine Blasey Ford—a research psychologist from Palo Alto, California—has accused Kavanaugh of attempting to rape her at a party when they were both  teenagers in “the early 1980s,” coming forward in a Washington Post report on Sunday.  “Kavanaugh physically pushed me into a bedroom as I was headed for a bathroom up a short stair well from the living room. They locked the door and played loud music precluding any successful attempt to yell for help,” she wrote in a letter sent to California Senataor Dianne Feinstein, and published by CNN.com. “Kavanaugh was on top of me while laughing with REDACTED, who periodically jumped onto Kavanaugh. They both laughed as Kavanaugh tried to disrobe me in their highly inebriated state. With Kavanaugh's hand over my mouth I feared he may inadvertently kill me.” Kavanaugh has categorically denied that any such incident as decscribed by Ford took place. But on Wednesday, a top supporter of Kavanaugh—Carrie Severino, who is chief counsel and policy director at the Judicial Crisis Network, which has funded about $1.5 million worth of pro-Kavanaugh advertising—dropped a hint of a possible defense for Kavanaugh, if he is forced to walk back his blunt denial. “Her allegations cover up a whole range of conduct, from boorishness to rough horseplay to actual attempted rape,” Severino said in a CNN interview, quoted by Mother Jones magazine. “I think you have to look at 35 years of memory that we’re trying to play with here, and I’m saying that the behavior she describes could describe a whole range of things.” Kavanaugh would have been a student at the elite, private Catholic high school, Georgetown Prep. In 2015, Kavanaugh told an audience at Catholic University of America's Columbus School of Law, “we had a good saying that we've held firm to to this day, which is: What happens at Georgetown Prep, stays at Georgetown Prep. I think that's been a good thing for all of us.” Also on Wednesday, Mark Judge—who has been named as the other man in the room when Kavanaugh was allegedly attempting to rape Blasey, according to her letter—issued a statement declaring that he would not testify under oath about the incident, saying that he has “no memory of this alleged incident.” Judge became a writer who is best known, according to New York Magazine, as a “defender of the patriarchy.” The Washington Post described Judge’s writing by saying, “In two memoirs, Judge depicted his high school as a nest of debauchery where students attended ‘masturbation class,’ ‘lusted after girls’ from nearby Catholic schools and drank themselves into stupors at parties. He has since renounced that lifestyle and refashioned himself as a conservative moralist—albeit one who has written about ‘the wonderful beauty of uncontrollable male passion.’” In one of his memoirs, Judge depicts himself as an extreme alcoholic as a young man, who frequently drank until blacked out and lost his memory. The memoir also featured a thinly disguised version of Kavanaugh, named in the book as “Bart O’Kavanaugh.” Photo By U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit / Wikimedia Commons Public Domain