Mark Judge, a writer who penned articles about Catholic sex abuse controversies and for conservative and other publications, including about his alcohol-fueled high school years, was identified by Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser Christine Blasey Ford as an eyewitness to the alleged attack.
However, despite Democratic efforts to get Republicans to do so, they did not call Judge to testify at the hearing on September 27, 2018. Judge, through his lawyer, did send the Senate Judiciary Committee a letter denying any knowledge of the party or alleged attack, which Kavanaugh also denies. (Two other people Blasey Ford says were at the party also said they have no recollection of it.)
Although Mark Judge is not in Washington for the hearing, where is he now? He was recently spotted in Bethany Beach, Delaware. 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.
Here’s what you need to know:
The Washington Post Tracked Judge Down to a Beach House in Delaware
In case you were wondering about him – ‘How’d you find me?’: Mark Judge has been holed up in a beach house in Delaware amid a media firestorm @washingtonpost t.co/03wXXnuQ2n
On September 24, 2018, The Washington Post reported that its reporter had located Judge – in Delaware. The Post reported that Judge was “holed up in the house of a longtime friend in Bethany Beach, nearly three hours away. A car in the driveway contained piles of clothing, a collection of Superman comics and a package addressed to Judge at the Potomac home where he lived three years ago.”
“How’d you find me?” he said to The Post reporter. Judge’s attorney told The Post she advised Judge to leave town because he was under incredible stress due to the allegations.
Judge 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.
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. Blasey Ford repeated her accusations against Kavanaugh and Ford in a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
GettyChristine Ford.
“It’s just absolutely nuts. I never saw Brett act that way,” Judge told the Weekly Standard of the Kavanaugh accusations when they first publicly emerged. 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.)
On September 23, 2018, the New Yorker published a second alleged account of sexual misconduct against Kavanaugh, which he also denies, dating to college. That allegation by a woman named Deborah Ramirez did not involve Judge, but the story included a separate allegation from a former girlfriend contradicting Judge’s comment to Weekly Standard that “I can recall a lot of rough-housing with guys. I don’t remember any of that stuff going on with girls.” Elizabeth Rasor alleged Judge “had told her ashamedly of an incident that involved him and other boys taking turns having sex with a drunk woman” that he regarded as consensual, but she said Judge didn’t name the other males involved. Judge’s attorney told The New Yorker that Judge categorically denies Rasor’s story.
One more flag from the New Yorker piece: Elizabeth Rasor, who dated Mark Judge for about three years, said that she felt morally obligated to challenge his account that “‘no horseplay’ took place at Georgetown Prep with women.” t.co/ZpAoaEuNIf
Michael Avenatti, the attorney for Stormy Daniels, then made allegations against Kavanaugh and Judge on Twitter.
My e-mail of moments ago with Mike Davis, Chief Counsel for Nominations for U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. We demand that this process be thorough, open and fair, which is what the American public deserves. It must not be rushed and evidence/witnesses must not be hidden.
Avenatti revealed the name of a third accuser – Julie Swetnick – on September 26, 2018. She is accusing Judge Brett Kavanaugh and Mark Judge of taking part in gang rapes, including one that she was a victim of, when they were in high school in the 1980s. Both Judge and Kavanaugh deny this account too.
Christine Blasey Ford accuses Kavanaugh of pinning her to a bed and groping her. The Post alleged: “Ford said she was able to escape when Kavanaugh’s friend and classmate at Georgetown Preparatory School, Mark Judge, jumped on top of them, sending all three tumbling.”
Judge revealed on September 9, 2018 on Facebook that he was receiving inquiries from editors about “high school and the 80s.” He’s written in the past about beer-fueled parties in the 1980s, about alcoholism, and has been sharply critical of Barack and Michelle Obama – along with many other topics. He also wrote on Facebook that he kept a diary from the 1980s.
Mark Judge has now deleted his Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Mark Judge Says He Has No Memory of the Alleged Party in Question & Doesn’t Want to Testify
Mark Judge
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:
Kavanaugh issued a statement in which he said, “I categorically and unequivocally deny this allegation. I did not do this back in high school or at any time.” Judge did not return a request from Heavy for comment.
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.
Mark Judge, referred to in letter as being in room with Kavanaugh and accuser at the time: “I can recall a lot of rough-housing with guys. It was an all-boys school, we would rough-house with each other,” he said . “I don’t remember any of that stuff going on with girls.”
Judge told The New York Times: “I never saw anything like what was described,” adding of Kavanaugh, “It is not who he is.” He described Kavanaugh to The Times as a “brilliant student,” whowas not “into anything crazy or illegal.”
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.”