“Creepy porn lawyer” Michael Avenatti’s sworn affidavit from a third Brett Kavanaugh accuser landed on the internet like an acme anvil Wednesday, blowing up a fresh cloud of dirt and debris around claims that the SCOTUS nominee was involved in sexually assaulting women during his years as a high school student at Georgetown Prep.
According to Julie Swetnick, whose identity was made public Wednesday in a tweet posted by Avenatti, Kavanaugh was allegedly present at parties in which young men were systematically gang-raping teen girls as a well-known practice.
Now, setting aside the obvious and suspicious question of why, if this were the well-known occurrence that Swetnick makes it seem, not a single person bothered to report it to authorities for nearly four solid decades, there are a few other major plot holes in her account that deserve some serious scrutiny.
Here are three.
Firstly, there’s the odd question of Swetnick's age.
In her online profile detailed by the New York Times, Swetnick claims to have graduated from Gaithersburg High School in 1980 before enrolling at the University of Maryland.
However, in her own sworn affidavit published by Avenatti, Swetnick claims that she first met Kavanaugh and his friend, Mark Judge, sometime between 1980 and 1981. That would’ve put Kavanaugh, who was born in 1965, at only 15 or 16 years old at the time. Swetnick also claims she attended multiple parties where the two were in attendance between 1980 and 1983, meaning Swetnick would have been a college student well into her junior year who was still attending high school parties filled with kids who went to a school a full 25 minutes away from hers.
While this isn’t entirely outside the realm of possibility, it seems odd that a 19- or 20-year-old college student and her friends would still be hanging out at parties with 16-year-olds, as her statement suggests.
Secondly, there’s the question of her apparent lack of judgment.
In the affidavit, Swetnick claims that “during the years 1981-1982,” she became “aware of efforts by Mark Judge, Brett Kavanaugh and others to ‘spike’ the ‘punch’ at house parties I attended with drugs and/or grain alcohol so as to cause girls to lose their inhibitions and their ability to say ‘No.’” Swetnick then alleges she has “a firm recollection of seeing boys lined up outside rooms at many of these parties waiting for their ‘turn’ with a girl inside the room.”
Knowing all this, Swetnick says she simply tried to “purposefully avoid the ‘punch’ at these parties.”
So let’s get this straight, here: Swetnick, who would’ve been a legal adult for most of if not the entire time she says she attended these parties, admits she was well aware that young men were intentionally drugging drinks in order to lure women into bedrooms and gang-rape them. But rather than report these claims to the authorities, or at the very least avoid the parties altogether, Swetnick not only kept quiet about the whole thing, but admits she actually kept attending the parties herself for up to two years afterward.
Thirdly, there’s the question of Swetnick’s own victimization timeline.
Despite saying she intentionally avoided the spiked drinks at the rape parties she kept attending for some inexplicable reason, Swetnick claims she herself was gang-raped at a party that occurred sometime in 1982, where Kavanaugh and Judge were allegedly in attendance.
However, earlier in her affidavit, Swetnick said she attended “well over 10 house parties in the Washington D.C. area during the years 1981-1983 where Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh were present.”
So according to her own timeline, not only did Swetnick know these parties were being used to drug and rape women, but says she herself was gang-raped at a party sometime in 1982 – yet continued to attend these same house parties until sometime in the following year.
Now, Swetnick signed the affidavit under penalty of perjury, assumedly meaning she understands the consequences of flat-out lying. But regardless of the validity of her graphic and seemingly far-out allegations, these are serious questions that demand some serious answers.