Facebook/Getty Mark Judge (r) is the high school classmate of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Mark Judge is a writer who penned articles about Catholic sex abuse controversies and for conservative and other publications, including about his alcohol-fueled high school years. He’s also been at the center of the firestorm over sexual assault allegations against his friend, Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee.
Judge first revealed to The Weekly Standard that he is the high school classmate of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh who is accused of being a witness to what happened between Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford. He’s since been accused by Kavanaugh’s third accuser, Julie Swetnick, of sexual misconduct with Kavanaugh at parties in the 1980s. He denies all of the accusations.
However, Mark Judge’s posts on his now deleted Facebook page and some of his writings give a glimpse into his persona.
On September 28, the Senate Judiciary Committee sent the nomination to the full Senate on the condition (orchestrated by swing Republican vote Sen. Jeff Flake) that a limited FBI investigation be conducted over no more than a week. Fox News then reported that Mark Judge has agreed to cooperate with the FBI in that investigation. Judge has already given a statement to the Senate denying any knowledge of the party where Ford says she was assaulted.
A controversial letter first alleged sexual misconduct by Kavanaugh against Ford in high school, an accusation which Kavanaugh has strenuously denied. In the interview with Weekly Standard, Judge also strongly denied the accusations. According to Weekly Standard’s John McCormack, who authored the article, Mark Judge is a writer in Washington D.C.
“It’s just absolutely nuts. I never saw Brett act that way,” Judge told the Weekly Standard of the Kavanaugh accusations. Judge essentially repeated that stance in a letter sent by his lawyer to the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 18, 2018, which you can read in full later in this article. (Patrick J. Smyth, who says in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee that Ford has claimed he was also at the party, has denied any knowledge of the party or misbehavior by Kavanaugh, as has a woman identified as possibly being at the party named Leland Keyer. You can read what Smyth said here.)
As the alleged third person in the room in an allegation now at the center of a hotly contested Supreme Court nomination, Mark Judge’s high school recollections have suddenly become of national importance.
Here’s what you need to know:
Judge Wrote on Facebook That He Was Getting Inquiries About High School
Mark Judge
Judge revealed on September 9, 2018 on Facebook that he was receiving inquiries from editors about “high school and the 80s.”
Mark Judge has now deleted his Facebook and Twitter accounts. However, you can see screenshots of some of his Facebook posts later in this article.
Barbara Van Gelder, the lawyer for Mark Judge, wrote a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which said Mark Judge doesn’t want to testify. The letter explains that Judge has nothing to offer the committee because he can’t remember the party in question and never saw Kavanaugh act as described. It reads:
I did not ask to be involved in this matter nor did anyone ask me to be involved. The only reason I am involved is because Dr. Christine Blasey Ford remembers me as the other person in the room during the alleged assault.
In fact, I have no memory of this alleged incident. Brett Kavanaugh and I were friends in high school but I do not recall the party described in Dr. Ford’s letter. More to the point, I never saw Brett act in the manner Dr. Ford describes.
I have no more information to offer the Committee and I do not wish to speak publicly regarding the incidents described in Dr. Ford’s letter.
Here is the letter in full:
In the interview with Weekly Standard, Judge said he could not even remember an incident that could be misconstrued in the way the New Yorker says the letter alleges. “I don’t remember any of that stuff going on with girls,” Judge told Weekly Standard, adding that the New Yorker didn’t provide him many details.
Judge Wrote on Facebook That He Met Brett Kavanaugh at ‘Beach Week’ in 1981; He’s Written for Conservative Publications, Among Others
A post on Mark Judge’s Facebook page.
On Facebook, Mark Judge has shared some information about Brett Kavanaugh. “He had the same haircut on the night I met him (at Beach Week) in 1981. I mean, the exact same haircut,” he wrote in July 2018, with a share of a New York Times story that declared that Kavanaugh’s law students had praised Kavanaugh as a law professor, including saying nice things about his hair.
Judge recently shared (before the controversy broke) an article by another author at the conservative site Hot Air that was headlined “Please, For the Love of God Let This Be the Last Supreme Court Nomination Hearing.” The article criticizes Democrats’ handling of the Kavanaugh nomination process.
A biography page shows that Mark Judge has himself written articles for the conservative publication The American Spectator (among many other places that his work has appeared.)
Judge has written pretty extensively about his high school years being filled with tales of alcohol.
For example, Judge wrote a book called Wasted: Tales of a GenX Drunk. The book blurb on Amazon reads, “The author recounts his own struggle against alcoholism, and describes his research into the causes of addiction and the history of treatment and recovery.”
The Amazon description continues:
With a touch of dark humor, Mark Judge takes the reader on a 12-step journey through his experience as a teenage alcoholic and the revelations that led to his recovery. This coming-of-age memoir is presented from the perspective of an ‘ordinary’ kid who grew up in a small town outside Washington, D.C., attended Catholic school, and experimented with alcohol in a fairly typical way. What is atypical is where the experimentation led. While his drunken acts first appear as little more than adolescent antics and harmless pranks, it slowly becomes apparent that there is a serious problem lurking behind the laughs and half-racks. After a series of events leads him into depression, humiliation, and confusion, Judge discovers both Alcoholics Anonymous and Milan Recovery, launching the narrative into a history of the programs and their respective pros and cons, the physiological roots of alcoholism, and the various misnomers related to the disease. In relating his experiences, Judge relies on his skills as a journalist to track the causes of addiction and the effectiveness of traditional recovery techniques while maintaining a deeply personal, though often cynical, tone.
According to the book, Judge described “his own blackout drinking and a culture of partying among students at his high school, renamed in the book ‘Loyola Prep.'” Although Kavanaugh is not mentioned in the book, according to The Post, a reference about a beach party references “Bart O’Kavanaugh,” who “puked in someone’s car the other night” and “passed out on his way back from a party.”
A 2009 article by Mark Judge on American Spectator’s website starts, “The decline of the mainstream media is not only a matter of liberal bias, but of linguistics. The dinosaur media is losing readers because it is full of bad writers.”
On September 5, he shared this article which ran on the Liberty Magazine website (and which is now deleted) with a Mark Judge byline about a beer-fueled 1985 party. Judge wrote on Facebook with the article share: “Just got a bit of a jolt from a high school buddy who just called me. This is (mostly) fiction, bro. Nothing to worry about.” The article uses the header “1985” and quotes a friend called Chris as saying of a woman, “She can only have an orgasm with a Republican” among other things.
The article then quotes Chris as saying, “I bet she’s got a great p*ssy. Just a sweet, tasty, real woman lady p*ssy. A Hollywood p*ssy. A cosmic girl p*ssy.”
The article describes a scene at the third week of “beach week,” saying, “We had a ‘T & A’ party and invited the girls from Trinity and St. Anne’s. We’d lie about having a serious chaperone, and they would then lie to their chaperones about it…Chris and I did a line of cocaine in the car.” It describes discussions about hookers and females’ attributes. “We talk and drank, and the party got louder and wilder. People paired off, Mueller and Walsh were wrestling with each other in a fight over the music, and a bottle got broken,” it continues.
On September 2, 2018, Judge shared the same article and wrote “based on a true story.” You can see that screenshot at the top of this fact section. Judge has since deleted it.
A previous version contained the byline Hartley Kane. It, too, no longer appears on the Liberty Island page.
Judge also had a YouTube page that is now deleted. One video focused in part on a woman.
In another Facebook post, he weighed in on an article reporting that people were threatening to boycott the New Yorker because Steve Bannon was going to headline a festival, writing, “It’s deeply sad what chickenshit babies we’ve become. David Remnick is a very good liberal journalist. Bannon has some odd ideas but was crucial in the 2016 election. I want to hear the conversation, as I would if Louis Farrakhan were being interviewed. Any student of history or politics would be curious about this. Grow. Up.”
Judge Criticized the Actions of Some ‘Homosexual Priests’; His High School Years Were Described as Wild
A now deleted post from Mark Judge’s Facebook page.
A biography for Judge defines him as “a journalist and filmmaker whose writings have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Daily Caller. His books include Damn Senators: My Grandfather and the Story of Washington’s Only World Series Championship and A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock ‘n’ Roll.” He also wrote a book called, God and Man at Georgetown Prep: How I Became a Catholic Despite 20 Years of Catholic Schooling.
That book blurb reads, “In this account, the author explores the role of Catholicism in Catholic institutions, presenting three Catholic universities and discussing their lack of religious conviction, arguing for more Catholic theological education and less secularism.”
On Twitter, where his tweets were privatized before he deleted the account, Judge defined himself as “Writer for the Acculturated, author of A Tremor of Bliss, filmmaker. From the Church to cheesecake and back.”
On Facebook, he writes as his profile, “Worked at Catholic (church). Lives in Washington, District of Columbia. From Washington, District of Columbia.”
However, his page shows an interest in criticism of the Catholic Church over its handling of priest sex abuse. For example, he recently shared an USA Today article by another author that reads, “Catholics, keep your wallets closed until the Church reforms from the Vatican on down.”
He wrote on Facebook: “Disgusted by both the liberal media and the conservative press (no reporters, just pundits), I realized that between my book and the articles I wrote exposing sexual abuse – work that goes back at least to 2005 – I was, as my friend here implies, way ahead on this, and deserved much better treatment by media organizations both left and right, which share a common cowardice and laziness when when it comes to this stuff.”
Judge authored an article for Splice Today that reads, “For years there’s been a problem with liberal and homosexual priests in the Catholic Church trying to change doctrine. Their personal behavior has often put young male students at risk for sexual abuse.”
The article references Georgetown Prep and calls “most of us… horny young guys” during that time. Specifically, it says, “A way through the current controversy is to simply fall back to the position that most people at Georgetown Prep had when I was there. We knew there were gay priests—a lot—but didn’t think they, or homosexuals in general, were going to hell. It was an unstated agreement. After all, most of us were horny young guys and when the girls at Stone Ridge, Holy Child, and Georgetown Visitation gave the thumbs down, we sometimes found that release by going it alone.”
Judge recently shared an article by another author for National Catholic Register on priest sex abuse that was headlined, “How to Recognize Demonic Activity in the Church Scandals, According to an Exorcist.”
On Facebook, he once wrote, “In the 1980s I was working at a theater when my dad helped bust up a Russian spy ring in D.C. It wasn’t cloak and dagger stuff, just making a phone call after seeing something suspicious.”
Judge’s father was Joseph Judge, who was an editor and writer for National Geographic, according to his obituary in The Washington Post. Joseph Judge undertook a five-year study to determine where Christopher Columbus actually landed, the obit reports, and wrote a book about a Civil War march by Confederate Gen. Jubal Early.
On social media, before he deleted it, Judge sometimes wrote about high school and often shared posts on politics, some which he wrote.
Mark Judge wrote recently on Facebook, “I was asked to write about my upcoming 35th high school reunion, and my favorite 80s songs from the time. (I can still remember dancing to this one at the Summer House). Some of my friends from the time have gone on to noteworthy careers.”
A deleted post from Mark Judge’s Facebook page.
Mark Judge recently shared a Town Hall.com column by another author that was headlined, “Brett Kavanaugh Deserves 95 Votes.”
Mark Judge has shared stories on sexual harassment in the past. For example, he shared a story on the accusations against former CBS head Les Moonves. The Hollywood Reporter article that Judge shared read, “‘Designing Women’ Creator Goes Public With Les Moonves War: Not All Harassment Is Sexual (Guest Column).” Judge wrote with the share, “Amazing.”
On September 11, 2018, he weighed in on something called the Small Press Expo, writing, “I love the fact that the Small Press Expo is always just a few days after 9/11. After that grief and anger you have three days of color, creativity, and a hotel filled with people who have the freedom to create anything they want. You get libertarian loners, weird sex fetishes, American history, memoirs, adolescent angst, politics, rock and roll. You walk around the room seeing freedom, freedom, freedom.”
He has also shared articles flattering to conservatives, including one from Politico that reads, “Liberals Don’t Know Much About Conservative History. And both sides suffer for it.”
In August, he shared a photo of a book called “1984 Yearbook” and wrote on Facebook, “Wow. Despite many moves, despite my ADD, despite the universe expanding, this thing appears. My 1984 diary. Terrified to open it but couldn’t resist three quick looks: 1) ‘Watched ‘Flashdance.’ Didn’t like it.’ 2) ‘Reading a book about Vietnam, want to go there.’ 3) ‘Spent all day cutting brush in 90 degree heat because parents are mad at us for summer parties. Wish I was at a movie with Meg instead.’ Pretty much my life now.”
Judge also shared an Axios story by another author that was headlined, “Fresh signs that Democrats won’t be able to stop Kavanaugh.” He also shared an article on Donald Trump that ran on Breitbart (and was written by another author.)
READ NEXT: Christine Blasey Ford’s Full Biography