On Sunday night, information about two new possible victims who may have been sexually assaulted by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh came to light.
The New Yorker reported that Senate Democrats are investigating allegations made by Deborah Ramirez, a classmate of Kavanaugh’s at Yale University.
Meanwhile, Michael Avenatti, the lawyer who has been representing pornstar Stormy Daniels in her lawsuit against President Trump, announced on Twitter that he is now representing a third woman who has “credible information” pertaining to Kavanaugh and Mark Judge.
This information comes as several other developments regarding the allegations made by Professor Christine Blasey Ford against Kavanaugh surfaced this week.
While Ford’s legal team spent the past week negotiating with Senator Chuck Grassley’s office on the terms of her appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee in a follow-up hearing scheduled for this Thursday, several outside groups have been offering supplementary evidence to either substantiate or disprove the allegations.
On Friday, a group of faculty at Yale Law School, of which Kavanaugh is an alumnus, published an open letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee in support of Ford’s requests for a FBI investigation, writing that “a partisan hearing alone cannot be the forum to determine the truth of the matter.”
The letter comes amid separate allegations that have been made by a recent Yale Law School graduate who alleged that one of her professors, Amy Chua, groomed students for clerkships with Kavanaugh and told her to behave and dress in an “outgoing” way.
Another woman who spoke to The Guardian corroborated allegations that Chua told students it was “not an accident” that accepted female clerks “looked like models;” however, Chua vehemently denied these allegations in a statement emailed to the Yale Law community. The woman who originally brought forth the accusations said Chua is “lying.”
At the same time, a separate controversy has arisen after Ed Whelan, a conservative legal activist and close friend of Kavanaugh’s, offered a defamatory theory on Twitter that suggested Ford had mistaken Kavanaugh for another classmate.
In the Twitter thread, which Whelan has since deleted and apologized for, Whelan named the classmate and used pictures of Kavanaugh and the classmate to suggest their resemblance may have confused Ford.
The frenzy around Whelan’s theory grew as reporters on Twitter pointed out that the mostly baseless theory was potentially libelous.
There is reason to believe that Brett Kavanaugh was a part of this conspiracy to libel an innocent man, and he will doubtless be asked about his role in this disgrace before the Congress next week. https://t.co/mF1DGrL5k7
— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) September 21, 2018
Others in the media; however, supported the idea that Ford had mistaken Kavanaugh for someone else.
On Tuesday, the Washington Post published a troubling opinion piece by Kathleen Parker that suggested there was a “Kavanaugh doppelganger.”
The Post op-ed came a day after the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board criticized the “#MeToo Kavanaugh Ambush.” In addition to suggesting Ford was mistaken, the Journal argued that, if true, Kavanaugh’s assault was “stupid” but not “evil” and a symptom of the “blurring influence of alcohol and adolescent hormones.”
Ford denied the idea in a statement to NBC News.
NEW: Dr. Ford dismisses mistaken identity theory: “I knew them both, and socialized with Chris Garrett. I even visited Chris Garrett when he was in the hospital. There is zero chance that I would confuse them.” https://t.co/5c6ffb2EDC
— Peter Alexander (@PeterAlexander) September 21, 2018
Though Whelan denied having spoken to Kavanaugh or anyone at the White House about the theory, the Washington Post reported that Ford claimed that Whelan looked at her LinkedIn page last Sunday, before Ford’s identity had been publicized.
When Ford received a notification that Whelan had looked at her profile, the Washington Post had only reached out to the White House for a comment.
More problematic is a Politico report that Whelan had worked on his doppelganger theory with CRC Public Relations, a Virginia PR firm that previously employed Garrett Ventry, a communications aide who had been working for Senator Grassley.
According to NBC News, Ventry had been coordinating Republican messaging in the wake of Ford’s allegations. Incidentally, Ventry resigned from both Grassley’s office and the PR firm after reports surfaced he had been fired from a previous job after an allegation of sexual harassment.