Yeah, this shit is damning: “Senior Republican staffers also learned of the allegation last week and, in conversations with The New Yorker, expressed concern about its potential impact on Kavanaugh’s nomination. Soon after, Senate Republicans issued renewed calls to accelerate the timing of a committee vote.”
Unless these emails say something like “I can make up an attempted rape story about Brett Kavanaugh, would you like me to do that” then those emails will be hand waived away and simply asking for help because the old white Republicans certainly will not help.
Further, as I said, you could never prove that the past allegations were unfounded and there would be criticism that a woman should not be believed simply because she was assaulted multiple times.
Even if she provided verifiably false additional details, that would be hand waived away by stating that she suffered such trauma that she merely misremembered the details (and again, I have heard these arguments from prosecutors in court!). Nothing, and I mean nothing realistic (again, unless she admitted in writing that she was making it up) can be exculpatory.
I had a case recently where a male victim alleged that two people hit him over the head with a baseball bat, stuffed him in the car trunk and took him to nearby woods and raped him.
The police arrested the two the next morning and pictures show that the trunk was stuffed full of older items that had clearly been there for a time. Further, the two witnesses that were at the home testified that the alleged victim got into the back seat of the car and left with the two voluntarily.
Exculpatory right? Case dismissed, right? Of course not. The trauma of the rape, according to the State, caused him to misremember how he got in the car!
That is my point, there is nothing exculpatory in these cases.
I’m not sure why everyone’s jumping down your throat over this post – of course it’s a concern, although I think you’ve made yourself perfectly clear on this point a few dozen times already, and there may not be any point in belaboring it.
But there’s the thing – lots of nominations are derailed by false allegations, all the time. Trump attempted to derail Obama’s reelection with a false allegation about his citizenship. Hillary Clinton’s nomination for president was derailed with false allegations about Vince Foster, Whitewater, Seth Rich, Benghazi, Buttery Emails, and breathlessly worded Russian fake news about how an indictment was going to drop days before the election.
False allegations are a huge deal, because people who are unable to separate believable allegations from unbelievable allegations believe them. And, to get a bit tribal here, conservatives have frickin’ weaponized false allegations to an alarming degree. It terrifies me that James O’Keefe still has a “career” making false allegations, it terrifies me that conservatives have already tried dabbling in sexual assault false allegations (re: Roy Moore, although there were some twists there).
Conservatives seem to have no problem with false allegations as long as it supports their cause; they’ve completely normalized fake news to the point where their own supporters don’t think there’s any functional difference between Russian troll farms and CNN.
In terms of the potential for being false, how does Dr. Ford’s story rack up against, say, false accusations that Seth Rich was murdered by Hillary Clinton? Have you spent as much time defending Hillary Clinton from bogus accusations as you have here defending Judge Kavanaugh? Why might that be? Which type of allegation is a bigger threat to our democracy? Obviously bogus false allegations that nevertheless take root with a disturbing percentage of the electorate, allegations which cannot be disproven or even realistically argued against because of the ridiculous nature of the “evidence” behind them and the shadowy nature of the “accusers?” Or face-to-face public accusations like Dr. Ford’s?
At the end of the day, I think most posters here aren’t worried about false rape allegations derailing good political candidates because we’re pretty good here about sussing out BS from reasonable claims, and we find Dr. Ford’s claims to be reasonable. If you don’t, sure, I can see being worried, but then there’s been a heap of stuff that should have been freaking you out all along.
Yet another example of anything that Trump touches dies.
He can pick them for sure. /s
steronz… beautiful post.
Dude, you’re arguing that we should just close all the law enforcement agencies, because investigations can’t ever prove anything and anyway, the state will just connive at false allegations.
Piffle.
It only needs to be exculpatory for enough of the Republicans that control the senate and/or Pence to vote for Kavanaugh, and we all know how easy that exculpation can be for them.
We’ve already been through this. You’re convinced there’s no chance anything could be found out (even though you concede in this post that maybe a damaging email could be going). I’m not convinced, and neither are many law enforcement and legal professionals speaking out about this. We don’t have to go around and around this tree again.
Don’t that have to rape someone first?
Avenatti claims to have multiple witnesses of Judge and Kavanaugh being involved in gang rapes.
https://twitter.com/MichaelAvenatti/status/1044032678951960576
Republicans certainly got some splaining to do.
Greenlighting an unethical hit job on a middle school teacher. Refusing to request an FBI investigation. Rushing to move to a vote despite knowledge of a second accusation. Implying via twitter that the accuser wasn’t really victimized because she didn’t immediately report it. Declaring that Ford’s testimony will have no affect on their vote in the absence of actually hearing her testimony or Kavanaugh’s.
Rot through and through.
Michael Avenatti just sent an email to the Senate Judiciary Committee in the person of an aide to Chuck Grassley that he has multiple witnesses who will testify that Brett Kavanagh, Mark Judge and others were involved in multiple house parties in the 80’s where they set up gang rapes via drugs & alcohol.
You can see the email Avenatti sent at that link. Here’s the text of the email, gleaned via OneNote’s image to text feature:
From: Michael J. Avenatti
sent: sunday, september 23, 2018 6:06 PM
To: Davis, Mike (Judiciary-Rep)
Subject: RE: SCOTUS — Avenati claim of evidence
Dear Mr. Davis:
Thank you for your email. We are aware of significant evidence of multiple house parties in the Washington, D.C. area during the early 1980s during which Brett Kavanaugh, Mark Judge and others would participate in the targeting of women with alcohol/drugs in order to allow a “train” of men to subsequently gang rape them. There are multiple witnesses that will corroborate these facts and each of them must be called to testify publicly. As a starting point, Senate investigators should pose the following questions to Judge Kavanaugh without delay and provide the answers to the American people:
-
Did you ever target one or more women for sex or rape at a house party? Did you ever assist Mark Judge or others in doing so?
-
Did you ever attend any house party during which a woman was gang raped or used for sex by multiple men?
-
Did you ever witness a line of men outside a bedroom at any house party where you understood a woman was in the bedroom being raped or taken advantage of?
-
Did you ever participate in any sexual conduct with a woman at a house party whom you understood to be intoxicated or under the influence of drugs?
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Did you ever communicate with Mark Judge or anyone else about your participation in a 'train" involving an intoxicated woman?
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Did you ever object or attempt to prevent one or more men from participating in the rape, or taking advantage, of a woman at any house party?
Please note that we will provide additional evidence relating to the above conduct both to the Committee and the American public in the coming days.
Regards,
Michael Avenatti
From: Davis, Mike (JudiciarrRep)
Sent: Sunday, September 23, 2018 4:42 PM
To: Michael J. Avenatti
Subject: SCOTIJS — Avenatti claim of evidence
Dear Mr. Avenatti,
According to your Tweet from 7:33 p.m. E.T. this evening, you claim to have information you consider credible regarding Judge Kavanaugh and Mark Judge. Please advise Of this information immediately so that Senate investigators may promptly begin an inquiry.
Thank you,
Mike Davis
Mike Davis, Chief Counsel for Nominations
IJnited States Senate Committee on the Judiciary
Senator Chuck Grassley (A-IA), ChairmanHere’s the major difference between the two. Sure, some right wing website can come out and say that Hillary Clinton murdered Seth Rich and some non-zero number of people will believe it. Those people would have never voted for Hillary Clinton before such story and will continue not to do so afterwards. The left does this as well, even going so far as to say that Donald Trump wants to engage in sexual intercourse with his own daughter. My pulse rate doesn’t rise when I read those because, again, only hard core partisans would believe such a thing.
More importantly, reasonable people can simply file that accusation in the circular file and move on with their lives. Murder allegations, especially uncorroborated ones can be shit-canned and nobody blinks an eye. But with any allegation of sexual assault, We Must Let Her Be Heard! We Must Take This Seriously! We Must Investigate! no matter how credible it is. And posters here have argued that allegations are credible if the accuser lived in a two county area of the accused.
Under the standard proposed by the #metoo movement, any crank can demand a Senate hearing. Just breaking now, Feinstein wants to postpone all committee action so that Ramirez’s allegations can be investigated. It smacks of partisanship when the allegations just happen to allow what one particular political party has wanted all along.
Shit just got really real.
Anyone want to guess odds the hearing scheduled for Thursday is delayed? And not because Dr. Ford wants it delayed…
And the Twitter shitstorm about to be unleashed by our President is likely to be epic.
Of course there’s partisanship. Refraining from investigating the allegations also “allows what one particular political party has wanted all along”. The challenge hear is to put aside the partisanship and determine the right course of action. And I haven’t heard a good argument (including your argument that there’s only a tiny chance such an investigation could find out anything) as to why these allegations shouldn’t be fully investigated.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe this is the first SC nominee who has ever been accused of sexual assault.
Since rape has always been a hard-to-disprove, career-ending, life-ruining accusation, sure seems to me that it would have been used as a political weapon way before now. Shouldn’t the Dems have played that card with Gorsuch, if their aim is to be disruptive to the conservative agenda as much as possible?
Not to mention, why would the slut whore liar not go balls-out with her lie? Why concoct a story about assault, when rape would be so much more disqualifying?
Giuliani told us that we couldn’t believe Stormy Daniels because she was a woman of low virtue, being a stripper and all. What’s he going to say about these accusers’ “virtues”. I can’t wait to hear what he says, since he’s the expert on morals and virtues nowadays.
Well, many did warn the Republicans about how competent Trump was in judging the people he selects. Too late for regrets.
Avenatti is a greaseball lawyer who represents a porn star. This is the third prong in this attack. Make some over the top allegations that can be used as left wing fodder while investigating the real ones. The next step is to have the modern equivalent of James Carville to bring forth witnesses that in 1988, Kavanaugh had women tied up in his basement as sex slaves.
All we need to restore sanity in this process is to have two of three of Collins, Murkowski, and Flake to hold serve and say that this is disgusting and unacceptable.
I think the ladies in ABCs the View (even the daughter of McCain) still wonder how a porn star is more trustworthy than Trump and henchmen, but here we are.