They can confirm him but everyone knows who he is

Several former Yale students who claim to have information regarding the alleged incident with Ramirez or about Kavanaugh’s behavior at Yale said that they had not been contacted by the F.B.I. Kenneth G. Appold was a suitemate of Kavanaugh’s at the time of the alleged incident. He had previously spoken to The New Yorker about Ramirez on condition of anonymity, but he said that he is now willing to be identified because he believes that the F.B.I. must thoroughly investigate her allegation. Appold, who is the James Hastings Nichols Professor of Reformation History at Princeton Theological Seminary, said that he first heard about the alleged incident involving Kavanaugh and Ramirez either the night it occurred or a day or two later. Appold said that he was “one-hundred-per-cent certain” that he was told that Kavanaugh was the male student who exposed himself to Ramirez. He said that he never discussed the allegation with Ramirez, whom he said he barely knew in college. But he recalled details—which, he said, an eyewitness described to him at the time—that match Ramirez’s memory of what happened. “I can corroborate Debbie’s account,” he said in an interview. “I believe her because it matches the same story I heard thirty-five years ago, although the two of us have never talked.”

Appold, who won two Fulbright Fellowships, and earned his Ph.D. in religious studies from Yale in 1994, also recalled telling his graduate-school roommate about the incident in 1989 or 1990. That roommate, Michael Wetstone, who is now an architect, confirmed Appold’s account and said, “It stood out in our minds because it was a shocking story of transgression.” Appold said that he initially asked to remain anonymous because he hoped to make contact first with the classmate who, to the best of his recollection, told him about the party and was an eyewitness to the incident. He said that he had not been able to get any response from that person, despite multiple attempts to do so. The New Yorker reached the classmate, but he said that he had no memory of the incident.

Appold reached out to the Bureau last weekend but did not hear back. Frustrated, he submitted a statement through an F.B.I. Web portal. During his first year at Yale, Appold lived in the basement of Lawrance Hall, one of the university’s freshman dormitories. He was in the same suite of bedrooms as Kavanaugh, sharing a common room. Appold said of Kavanaugh, “We didn’t hang out together, but there was no animosity between us either.” He said he believes that “there were two sides to Brett.” Those who have described the judge as studious and somewhat reserved or shy are correct, he said. He added, “That was true part of the time, but so are the other things that have been said about him. He drank a lot, and when he was drinking he could be aggressive, and belligerent. He wasn’t beating people up, but there was an edge and an obnoxiousness that I could see at the hearings. When I saw clips”—of Kavanaugh’s Senate testimony—“I remembered it immediately.”

Appold said that he learned about the alleged incident with Ramirez during the winter of the 1983-84 school year. He recalled being told that, during a party in a first-floor common room in Lawrance Hall, Kavanaugh went over to Ramirez, who had been participating in a drinking game, “and opened his pants, and pulled out his penis, and tried to put it in her face.” But she waved him away. Appold recalled hearing that Ramirez said something like “It’s not a real penis.” He said that the remark made no sense to him at the time, and he understood it only after reading Ramirez’s allegation in The New Yorker and learning that people had been playing pranks with a fake plastic penis at the party.

Kavanaugh and thirteen other Georgetown Prep boys described themselves in their high-school yearbook as “Renate Alumnius,” which other classmates have told the Times was a crude sexual boast. During his Senate hearing, Kavanaugh said that the reference was an endearment, saying, “She was a great friend of ours. We—a bunch of us went to dances with her. She hung out with us as a group.” He said that a “media circus that has been generated by this, though, and reported that it referred to sex. It did not.”

But the classmate who submitted the statement said that he heard Kavanaugh “talk about Renate many times,” and that “the impression I formed at the time from listening to these conversations where Brett Kavanaugh was present was that Renate was the girl that everyone passed around for sex.” The classmate said that “Brett Kavanaugh had made up a rhyme using the REE NATE pronunciation of Renate’s name” and sang it in the hallways on the way to class. He recalled the rhyme going, “REE NATE, REE NATE, if you want a date, can’t get one until late, and you wanna get laid, you can make it with REE NATE.” He said that while he might not be remembering the rhyme word for word, “the substance is 100 percent accurate.” He added, “I thought that this was sickening at the time I heard it, and it left an indelible mark in my memory.”

Reached for comment, Dolphin noted that she had asked for her name to be removed from a statement signed by female supporters of Kavanaugh’s nomination. “If this report is true, I am profoundly hurt,” she said, of the account in the affidavit. “I did nothing to deserve this. There is nothing affectionate or respectful in bragging about making sexual conquests that never happened. I am not a political person, but my reputation matters to me and to my family. I would not have signed the letter if I had known about the yearbook references and this affidavit. It is heartbreaking if these guys who acted like my friends in high school were saying these nasty, false things about me behind my back.”

On another page, the paper’s editors relentlessly attacked the girls at Holton-Arms, the nearby private school from which Ford graduated in 1984.

The mimeographed rag included slurs against girls at Holton-Arms School, which Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford attended.

“The Truth About Holton,” read the headline of one piece, which was first described by the New York Times this week. “What is Holton Arms? Is it a training academy for The Rainbow Inn? We do know that Holton is the home of the most worthless excuse for an underground newspaper. In fact, it is also home of the most worthless excuses for human females.”

The article went on to refer to a typical Holton student as a “Holton Hosebag,” which, according to one classmate, meant a “woman who exists for a man’s pleasure, a human receptacle for semen, and just thrown away like you would a bag.”

The Class of 1983 yearbook lists Judge as the Unknown Hoya’s “co-founder;” Brooke Anthony Beyer Jr., now a senior assistant general counsel for NASCAR, as editor; William Glenn Geimer, the president of a Washington-based firm called Iron Vine Security, as co-editor in chief; and John Andrew Gibbons as a staff writer. Another student, Richard J. Simeone Jr., a lawyer for Potters & Della Pietra, simply listed the Unknown Hoya on his yearbook page as one of his activities.

Of the five men known to work on the paper, three of them — Geimer, Gibbons and Simeone — signed a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee endorsing Kavanaugh.
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At least one teacher knew about it, a late priest identified by Judge as Father Hart who shook his head when he saw it, and said, “You guys have what could be a great thing, and you’re turning it into garbage.”

Judge described himself as “offended.”

“[We] were working hard putting the paper together,” he wrote, “and on the days it came out we could see students all over campus tripping over themselves laughing. What was the problem?”

Hart, he explained, was upset that Judge was not creating something in the mold of the 1960s “underground press” that championed civil rights.

“To us everything was a joke. We had no concern for the truth,” Judge wrote. “We were mocking people without pointing to what we found good — aside from drinking, sex and violent homemade movies.”