Julie Swetnick just changed everything about the Brett Kavanaugh nomination
Julie Swetnick, a former State Department and Treasury Department employee, has come forward to accuse Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of having participated in multiple gang rape parties. These parties allegedly included women being drugged without their knowledge, and trains of men lined up to rape them while they were semi-conscious or unconscious. This reads like something out of a horror novel – and it changes everything.
The first accuser alone should have been enough for an FBI criminal investigation. The second accuser should have made it a slam dunk. Kavanaugh is seeking to permanently hold one of the highest positions in the federal government, and because he’s the target of several unresolved felony accusations, this should be resolved by a federal investigation if he still wants the job. But this third accusation is a whole different ballgame.
Even as Brett Kavanaugh has insisted that none of these incidents ever happened, some of his apologists have tried a different spin. They’ve subtly tried to paint him as a naive doofus, a mere product of his time, a hapless teenager with no social skills who simply had no understanding of consent. That excuse is as deranged on its face as it is insulting to victims everywhere, but it’s how they’ve been trying to sell it, and – disappointingly – some people were buying it.
Now, however, Brett Kavanaugh is being accused of having participated in an ongoing plot to drug women at parties so the guys in attendance could line up and take turns raping them. Good luck spinning that in the court of public opinion. The disgusting “even if it happened, it’s not so bad” rationale goes out the window. This is, in all seriousness, something out of a Law & Order SVU episode. In fact, Bill Cosby just went to prison yesterday for drugging and raping women. Yes, the details of that case were different. But it tells you what kind of territory we’re in here.
Even if Kavanaugh’s apologists continue to try to spin this gang rape accusations as “boys will be boys” or “he was naive” or “he’s a better man now,” there’s just no way it’s going to stick now. Those rationales shouldn’t have rung true for anyone when the first two Kavanaugh accusers came forward. Yet here we are in the massively flawed court of public opinion anyway. Few are going to buy the notion that even if Kavanaugh was a serial gang rapist in his youth, he should still get to be on the Supreme Court. In fact, it’s difficult to imagine how this doesn’t result in series of criminal trials for Kavanaugh and his buddies. The only question is what happens in the mean time.
