Kavanaugh sworn in
- Thread starter Captain.Heroin
- Start date
cduggles
Bluelight Crew
Anyone who doesn't understand that the confirmation of a Supreme Court nominee by the Senate is a political shark tank, while an FBI investigation is not, doesn't really want the truth and is probably an idiot.
I'm not exactly a fan of the FBI, but I'd rather have them investigate a claim than jump in the blades of a high stakes political wood chipper.
I'm not exactly a fan of the FBI, but I'd rather have them investigate a claim than jump in the blades of a high stakes political wood chipper.
zephyr
Ex-Bluelighter
Well, this lady has publically accused a guy of sexual assault, it's a little late if she does not want to testify.
There should be a law stating testifying under oath in a closed hearing at least , is compulsory in cases like this. Too bad if she does not want to.
What else should she expect to happen? That doesnt really make sense. Go public but not under oath?
It's not a political party issue, it's an assault, FBI or the pigs, who cares what the pollies think
JGrimez
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Jan 23, 2018
- Messages
- 5,495
Except it isn't an FBI matter. It's local police. It wasn't by a federal employee and wasn't on federal property (or maybe it was if she ever remembers anything)
cduggles
Bluelight Crew
Sorry for the dub:
Another great bonus for accusers is security and housing for your family to flee all the death threats!:
[h=1]Internet raises $50K for Christine Blasey Ford’s security costs after she had to flee her home[/h]
Another great bonus for accusers is security and housing for your family to flee all the death threats!:
[h=1]Internet raises $50K for Christine Blasey Ford’s security costs after she had to flee her home[/h]
cduggles
Bluelight Crew
Ooh. Snarky and wrong!
tathra
bluelighter
this is why women dont come forward when sexually assaulted - constant attacks, death threats, character assassinations, and so on. every. single. time. because they dared try to hold scumbag rapists accountable for their actions.
zephyr
Ex-Bluelighter
cduggles
Bluelight Crew
Apparently Kavanaugh's school had a rapey clique and culture...according to over 1,000 lyin' women and men (see bold below):
[h=1]'The stories of our lives': Prep school alumni hear echoes in assault claim[/h]
Photo: Andrew Harnik, Associated Press
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa
WASHINGTON - Bettina Lanyi remembers. It was 1986, and she was in eighth grade. She and a friend went to a house in Washington's Tenleytown neighborhood packed with high school kids, including a throng of boys from Gonzaga College High School and Georgetown Preparatory School. There was a lot of beer. A few fights broke out. Lanyi recalls being pawed and kissed. It freaked her out. She hadn't been drinking, but her friend, also an eighth-grader, had.
Lanyi turned around to see a large freshman from one of the schools lying on top of her friend. Lanyi, then a petite 13-year-old, shoved the boy and kicked him. The boy was surprised and appealed to Lanyi to let him continue. "I'll never get her number otherwise," he told her. She took her friend and left.
Lanyi has thought about that night often since Sunday, when Christine Blasey Ford publicly accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when she was a 15-year-old student at Holton-Arms School and he was a 17-year-old student at Georgetown Prep. She has thought about stories of male entitlement and drunken sexual assault she heard from classmates while she was a student at Prep's Bethesda neighbor, Stone Ridge of the Sacred Heart, and the many more stories she has heard in the years since their graduation.
"There was a lot of shame and stigma then if a girl was raped, so girls tried to hide it. They didn't tell anyone," Lanyi said. "The term 'date rape' wasn't something that even existed then. So if it happened, it was always kind of the girl's fault."
Lanyi's recollection of a private school culture suffused by alcohol and drugs - and frequent if unreported sexual assault or misbehavior - is widely shared by students who attended those schools in the 1980s. It was, they recalled, an era marked by excess and illegality that went widely unchecked by parents and school leaders who were unaware or uninterested in cracking down on the behavior.
On Tuesday, Lanyi helped launch an online letter of support for Ford from women and men who grew up in the upper Northwest Washington neighborhoods and Maryland suburbs that fed into the exclusive private schools and country clubs during the same era that Ford and Kavanaugh attended their schools.
The letter's message to Ford is unambiguous: "We believe you. Each one of us heard your story and not one of us was surprised. These are the stories of our lives and our friends' lives."
Christine Blasey Ford isn?t the first woman to accuse a Supreme Court nominee of sexual misconduct ? Anita Hill reminds us that she was in the same position in 1991. This video, "Anita Hill Finds Similarities Between Her Experience and Christine Blasey Ford's", first appeared on nowthisnews.com.
More than 300 people signed the letter, including graduates of Stone Ridge, Georgetown Prep, Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School, Gonzaga and many others.
A similar letter of support for Ford from Holton-Arms graduates bore 925 signatures Wednesday, including from actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Class of 1979.
The letters came in response to a missive Friday signed by 65 women supporting Kavanaugh after the assault allegations emerged but before Ford came forward.
"We are women who have known Brett Kavanaugh for more than 35 years and knew him while he attended high school between 1979 and 1983. For the entire time we have known Brett Kavanaugh, he has behaved honorably and treated women with respect," read the letter, from women who attended schools including Visitation, Stone Ridge and Holton-Arms.
This story is based on interviews with two dozen former students, many of whom asked not to be identified because of how tightly knit and powerful the alumni from those schools are, and because they fear retribution or harassment for speaking out on the allegations engulfing Kavanaugh's nomination.
They described parties with kegs of beer and bottles of liquor, grain punch, heavy drinking and drug use that took place almost every weekend and even on weeknights in private homes, parks, open fields and golf courses in Maryland and Washington. Until 1986, the drinking age in Washington was 18, and alcohol was easily accessible. Drugs, especially cocaine and quaaludes, were plentiful.
Women who attended those parties remember sexually aggressive behavior by some of the male students that often bordered on assault and was routinely fueled by excessive drinking.
"Most of the guys at these schools were really decent, nice guys, but there was a small minority that was popular and was out of control," said a woman who attended Georgetown Visitation in the early 1980s and asked not to be identified. "I never got dragged into a bedroom, but that . . . happened to girls all the time."
Another woman who did not want to be identified said what she witnessed and what happened to her friends left her scarred three decades later.
"It was just a horrible culture," she said. "I never married, I don't have kids, and I trace it all back to those parties."
All of the women interviewed for this story took pains to point out that not all of the students at the all-boys schools took part in this culture. But the problem was widespread and toxic, they said.
"There were lots of teenage boys I knew at Prep and Gonzaga who were not sexually assaulting girls, but they were in an environment where that was seen as acceptable," said a woman who attended Stone Ridge in the late 1980s and is a member of the Blessed Sacrament Roman Catholic parish in Washington, the same church Kavanaugh attends. "The story that Dr. Ford told, that doesn't surprise me at all."
Women also recounted threats and verbal assault and demeaning behavior and comments.
A 1980 Visitation graduate recalls politely asking a Georgetown Prep football player and his friends to leave a party that had ended at her friend's house. The boys didn't want to go and said so, asking the woman how she was going to make them leave. One took a step in her direction. She cracked the Heineken bottle from which she had been drinking against the wall and pointed the jagged edge at him. The boy walked away, muttering obscenities. They weren't friends before, and certainly not after. The woman watched as the man steadily became a pillar of society. She doubts he remembers.
"When alcohol was involved, it always got worse," said a woman who attended Stone Ridge in the 1980s and asked not to be identified. "The boys were really unable to regard young women as intellectual, social equals, and it was really infuriating to me. It's so jarring to feel like you're a competent, confident person, and then boys can't treat you like a human."
In July, more than 150 Georgetown Prep graduates wrote a letter of support that extolled Kavanaugh as a friend and leader, saying, in part, "We unite in our common belief that Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh is a good man, a brilliant jurist, and is eminently qualified to serve as an Associate Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court."
Several Georgetown Prep graduates interviewed for this story who attended during the 1980s say they have fond memories of the school and the lifetime friendships they forged there. But they also corroborate the impression that alcohol was an integral part of the school's identity at the time and that heavy drinking and disregard or mistreatment of women were widely accepted.
"Drinking was part of the fabric of the school from the first day of freshman year to graduation," said Bill Barbot, who graduated from Georgetown Prep in 1986 and overlapped with Kavanaugh and with Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. He went on to play guitar for the critically acclaimed indie punk band Jawbox and heads a digital marketing agency in Washington.
Barbot said he never witnessed any of his schoolmates take advantage of a drunk girl, but he remembers that many students at the all-boys school did not have healthy relationships with their counterparts from all-girls schools, particularly at parties.
"A lot of us didn't really have a proper education in how to manage yourself in situations that were complicated to manage as a teenager, but incredibly complicated to manage as an inebriated teenager," Barbot said. "That is in no way an excuse for anyone to act inappropriate or violently, but it's the truth about the school then."
Terrance MacMullan, a 1990 graduate of Georgetown Prep who is a philosophy professor at Eastern Washington University, remembers his high school as a place where women and sex "took on this mystical, fetishized, totemic role in our lives, and there was this idea that once they got drunk, they were really available for this. That was one of the psychoses or bad ideas I had about women while I was there."
On Tuesday, MacMullan signed the letter of support for Ford. He said he has no idea whether Kavanaugh sexually assaulted Ford, but "my inclination is to assume the accuser is speaking in good faith."
"I'm really sad this is being associated with my school, but I'm furious and heartbroken that this happened to this woman and that's she's having to go through this all over again," MacMullan said.
[h=1]'The stories of our lives': Prep school alumni hear echoes in assault claim[/h]
Photo: Andrew Harnik, Associated Press
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa
WASHINGTON - Bettina Lanyi remembers. It was 1986, and she was in eighth grade. She and a friend went to a house in Washington's Tenleytown neighborhood packed with high school kids, including a throng of boys from Gonzaga College High School and Georgetown Preparatory School. There was a lot of beer. A few fights broke out. Lanyi recalls being pawed and kissed. It freaked her out. She hadn't been drinking, but her friend, also an eighth-grader, had.
Lanyi turned around to see a large freshman from one of the schools lying on top of her friend. Lanyi, then a petite 13-year-old, shoved the boy and kicked him. The boy was surprised and appealed to Lanyi to let him continue. "I'll never get her number otherwise," he told her. She took her friend and left.
Lanyi has thought about that night often since Sunday, when Christine Blasey Ford publicly accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when she was a 15-year-old student at Holton-Arms School and he was a 17-year-old student at Georgetown Prep. She has thought about stories of male entitlement and drunken sexual assault she heard from classmates while she was a student at Prep's Bethesda neighbor, Stone Ridge of the Sacred Heart, and the many more stories she has heard in the years since their graduation.
"There was a lot of shame and stigma then if a girl was raped, so girls tried to hide it. They didn't tell anyone," Lanyi said. "The term 'date rape' wasn't something that even existed then. So if it happened, it was always kind of the girl's fault."
Lanyi's recollection of a private school culture suffused by alcohol and drugs - and frequent if unreported sexual assault or misbehavior - is widely shared by students who attended those schools in the 1980s. It was, they recalled, an era marked by excess and illegality that went widely unchecked by parents and school leaders who were unaware or uninterested in cracking down on the behavior.
On Tuesday, Lanyi helped launch an online letter of support for Ford from women and men who grew up in the upper Northwest Washington neighborhoods and Maryland suburbs that fed into the exclusive private schools and country clubs during the same era that Ford and Kavanaugh attended their schools.
The letter's message to Ford is unambiguous: "We believe you. Each one of us heard your story and not one of us was surprised. These are the stories of our lives and our friends' lives."
Christine Blasey Ford isn?t the first woman to accuse a Supreme Court nominee of sexual misconduct ? Anita Hill reminds us that she was in the same position in 1991. This video, "Anita Hill Finds Similarities Between Her Experience and Christine Blasey Ford's", first appeared on nowthisnews.com.
More than 300 people signed the letter, including graduates of Stone Ridge, Georgetown Prep, Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School, Gonzaga and many others.
A similar letter of support for Ford from Holton-Arms graduates bore 925 signatures Wednesday, including from actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Class of 1979.
The letters came in response to a missive Friday signed by 65 women supporting Kavanaugh after the assault allegations emerged but before Ford came forward.
"We are women who have known Brett Kavanaugh for more than 35 years and knew him while he attended high school between 1979 and 1983. For the entire time we have known Brett Kavanaugh, he has behaved honorably and treated women with respect," read the letter, from women who attended schools including Visitation, Stone Ridge and Holton-Arms.
This story is based on interviews with two dozen former students, many of whom asked not to be identified because of how tightly knit and powerful the alumni from those schools are, and because they fear retribution or harassment for speaking out on the allegations engulfing Kavanaugh's nomination.
They described parties with kegs of beer and bottles of liquor, grain punch, heavy drinking and drug use that took place almost every weekend and even on weeknights in private homes, parks, open fields and golf courses in Maryland and Washington. Until 1986, the drinking age in Washington was 18, and alcohol was easily accessible. Drugs, especially cocaine and quaaludes, were plentiful.
Women who attended those parties remember sexually aggressive behavior by some of the male students that often bordered on assault and was routinely fueled by excessive drinking.
"Most of the guys at these schools were really decent, nice guys, but there was a small minority that was popular and was out of control," said a woman who attended Georgetown Visitation in the early 1980s and asked not to be identified. "I never got dragged into a bedroom, but that . . . happened to girls all the time."
Another woman who did not want to be identified said what she witnessed and what happened to her friends left her scarred three decades later.
"It was just a horrible culture," she said. "I never married, I don't have kids, and I trace it all back to those parties."
All of the women interviewed for this story took pains to point out that not all of the students at the all-boys schools took part in this culture. But the problem was widespread and toxic, they said.
"There were lots of teenage boys I knew at Prep and Gonzaga who were not sexually assaulting girls, but they were in an environment where that was seen as acceptable," said a woman who attended Stone Ridge in the late 1980s and is a member of the Blessed Sacrament Roman Catholic parish in Washington, the same church Kavanaugh attends. "The story that Dr. Ford told, that doesn't surprise me at all."
Women also recounted threats and verbal assault and demeaning behavior and comments.
A 1980 Visitation graduate recalls politely asking a Georgetown Prep football player and his friends to leave a party that had ended at her friend's house. The boys didn't want to go and said so, asking the woman how she was going to make them leave. One took a step in her direction. She cracked the Heineken bottle from which she had been drinking against the wall and pointed the jagged edge at him. The boy walked away, muttering obscenities. They weren't friends before, and certainly not after. The woman watched as the man steadily became a pillar of society. She doubts he remembers.
"When alcohol was involved, it always got worse," said a woman who attended Stone Ridge in the 1980s and asked not to be identified. "The boys were really unable to regard young women as intellectual, social equals, and it was really infuriating to me. It's so jarring to feel like you're a competent, confident person, and then boys can't treat you like a human."
In July, more than 150 Georgetown Prep graduates wrote a letter of support that extolled Kavanaugh as a friend and leader, saying, in part, "We unite in our common belief that Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh is a good man, a brilliant jurist, and is eminently qualified to serve as an Associate Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court."
Several Georgetown Prep graduates interviewed for this story who attended during the 1980s say they have fond memories of the school and the lifetime friendships they forged there. But they also corroborate the impression that alcohol was an integral part of the school's identity at the time and that heavy drinking and disregard or mistreatment of women were widely accepted.
"Drinking was part of the fabric of the school from the first day of freshman year to graduation," said Bill Barbot, who graduated from Georgetown Prep in 1986 and overlapped with Kavanaugh and with Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. He went on to play guitar for the critically acclaimed indie punk band Jawbox and heads a digital marketing agency in Washington.
Barbot said he never witnessed any of his schoolmates take advantage of a drunk girl, but he remembers that many students at the all-boys school did not have healthy relationships with their counterparts from all-girls schools, particularly at parties.
"A lot of us didn't really have a proper education in how to manage yourself in situations that were complicated to manage as a teenager, but incredibly complicated to manage as an inebriated teenager," Barbot said. "That is in no way an excuse for anyone to act inappropriate or violently, but it's the truth about the school then."
Terrance MacMullan, a 1990 graduate of Georgetown Prep who is a philosophy professor at Eastern Washington University, remembers his high school as a place where women and sex "took on this mystical, fetishized, totemic role in our lives, and there was this idea that once they got drunk, they were really available for this. That was one of the psychoses or bad ideas I had about women while I was there."
On Tuesday, MacMullan signed the letter of support for Ford. He said he has no idea whether Kavanaugh sexually assaulted Ford, but "my inclination is to assume the accuser is speaking in good faith."
"I'm really sad this is being associated with my school, but I'm furious and heartbroken that this happened to this woman and that's she's having to go through this all over again," MacMullan said.
treezy z
Bluelighter
The FBI doesn't do sex cases. Also, if she has provided zero specifics, time, location, they have zero useful information to run an investigation.
It is a cynical ploy to hold off on the vote until after midterms, and this stunt could cause a red wave.
tathra
bluelighter
well It is "standard practice" to not confirm nominations to the Supreme Court in an election year anyway, so they kinda have to hold off on confirming him... and i seem to remember there being a big stink about how a president under FBI investigation shouldnt be able to nominate anyone anyway, as they're unfit to be president...
yep. the merrick garland hypocrisy here on the part of the republicans is clear.
alasdair
alasdair
iridescentblack
Bluelighter
"Dear Diary,
Today I was almost raped and I'm logging the specific date and time of the event in the hopes that one day if that asshole becomes political, I'll ruin his ass."
I fail to see how specifics are really that relevant here. Cavanaugh seems incapable of answering even the most basic questions. I can imagine a police officer coming to his door asking, "Where were you on the night of...?" and Cavanaugh basically losing his mind.
Captain.Heroin
Bluelight Crew
https://nypost.com/2018/09/20/kavanaugh-and-his-accuser-are-both-getting-death-threats/
I can't imagine anyone who really gives a fuck so thoroughly to threaten Kavanaugh and his wife's lives but, seriously, I found it very entertaining and I totally sympathize with whomever is that angry.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/09/amy-chua-advice-brett-kavanaugh-clerks-report.html
Report: Female Students Were Told It Was “Not an Accident” Kavanaugh’s Female Clerks “Looked Like Models”
And the dominoes fall...
I can't imagine anyone who really gives a fuck so thoroughly to threaten Kavanaugh and his wife's lives but, seriously, I found it very entertaining and I totally sympathize with whomever is that angry.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/09/amy-chua-advice-brett-kavanaugh-clerks-report.html
Report: Female Students Were Told It Was “Not an Accident” Kavanaugh’s Female Clerks “Looked Like Models”
And the dominoes fall...
tathra
bluelighter
somebody so incompetent and incapable isnt fit to be a judge, much less a judge on the highest court in the land. its like when the DEA heads would get questioned by congress and explain in front of everyone how they have absolutely no clue how to do their jobs and no knowledge whatsoever of the fields or agency relevant to their job; they should have been fired immediately for such incompetence and ignorance.
zephyr
Ex-Bluelighter
Yep. This is really great. The entertainment of watching lives fall apart into a shitstorm clusterfuck. And look who us enjoying seeing this a delighting in the bullshit. 8)
If it happened to you, you would be equally as pleased.
If a system can put Trump as President then if you get a tool for Supreme Court then too bad too sad, tactics like this ruin lives
I'm convinced this lady was telling the truth but it is too little an incident on it's own to do harm but with shit like this it could remove him.
The collateral damage of a ruined family or two- who cares right?
Stupid.
If it happened to you, you would be equally as pleased.
If a system can put Trump as President then if you get a tool for Supreme Court then too bad too sad, tactics like this ruin lives
I'm convinced this lady was telling the truth but it is too little an incident on it's own to do harm but with shit like this it could remove him.
The collateral damage of a ruined family or two- who cares right?
Stupid.
Captain.Heroin
Bluelight Crew
No, it's not stupid. The first amendment allows for the news to get told to people. What people do with that information is on them. Negative responsibility is an important concept to understand.
I don't know if you have the right to free speech in Aus. I suppose not, given that the gov't censors media like movies, like how some movies are considered too intense to be legal over there.
Yup. The 1st amendment is very important.
LandsUnknown
Bluelighter
It is. It's civil, in terms of being something that one could indeed file a lawsuit over and win a substantial payout in court. It's also criminal if they lied under oath in court (e.g. perjury), and that would get a false accuser locked up.
swilow
Bluelight Crew
It is pathetic and shameful that some people instinctively disbelieve such allegations.
Obviously innocent until guilty but this default doubting says something truly awful about advocates of this view.
Obviously innocent until guilty but this default doubting says something truly awful about advocates of this view.