At the Center of the Kavanaugh Accusations: Heavy Drinking

As accusations of sexual impropriety have threatened to upend the confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, a common theme has emerged connecting the decades-old alleged incidents: heavy drinking.

Christine Blasey Ford described Kavanaugh as “stumbling drunk” when, as a 17-year-old prep school student in suburban Washington, he allegedly tried to force himself on her during a party in 1982. Then, at an alcohol-fueled gathering during his freshman year at Yale, his former classmate Deborah Ramirez says, Kavanaugh exposed himself to her. He has denied both allegations.

The backdrop to these complaints was a culture of hard partying that permeated certain quarters of high school and college life in the 1980s, when binge drinking among teenagers had reached record levels. No evidence has emerged to indicate the episodes of drinking ascribed to Kavanaugh back then carried forward into his professional or family life, or that the handful of FBI background checks he has faced in his official Washington career unearthed any red flags about his drinking as an adult.

But it is his high school and undergraduate years that have proved to be a minefield during his Supreme Court confirmation process, and questions about drinking during that period are expected to come up when he testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday. Kavanaugh himself has provided grist for this line of inquiry through his wistful references to youthful drinking in yearbook entries and speeches over the years, though he has said he never drank so much that he blacked out or could not remember events.

While his recollections are of harmless partying, interviews with his former classmates turned up less sanguine memories of Kavanaugh and alcohol. While some found Kavanaugh’s college drinking unexceptional, nearly a dozen others said they recalled his indulging in heavy drinking, with some characterizing it as outside the norms of college life. James Roche, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who roomed with Kavanaugh their freshman year at Yale, described him as “frequently unusually drunk” and someone who could become “belligerent and mean” when he drank.

Another former classmate, Dr. Elizabeth Swisher, now a gynecologic oncologist in Seattle, said it would be “a lie” to say that he “never had a blackout” from drinking in college.

“I saw him very drunk many times and there is no way he remembers everything about every night,” she said.

Several Yale classmates recounted an incident during Kavanaugh’s senior year: After a bout of drinking, they said, he tried to break into the enclosed back of a pickup truck belonging to one of them, and later refused to apologize or repair the damage.

The White House did not address the incident, but in a statement Tuesday, a spokeswoman called the focus on Kavanaugh’s youthful drinking “absurd.”

Friends and colleagues who have known Kavanaugh in his post-college years said he drank beer socially, but none could recall seeing him drunk. The judge enjoys beer — Bud Light is a favorite, one friend said — but never has more than two or three in a night, they said.

“Drinking patterns often change,” said Sharon Levy, director of the Adolescent Substance Use and Addiction Program at Boston Children’s Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School. “As kids mature, they often stop that heavy drinking.”

In prepared remarks for his expected committee testimony Thursday, Kavanaugh acknowledged having drunk beer with friends in high school, and that “sometimes I had too many.” And in a Fox News interview Monday, he said things might have happened back then that would make someone “regret or cringe a bit,” but he described them as normal and innocent, and certainly nothing approaching close to the drunken sexual assault alleged by Blasey.

“Yes, there were parties,” he said. “The drinking age was 18. And yes, the seniors were legal and had beer there, and yes, people might have had too many beers on occasion.”

In fact, the legal drinking age in Maryland, where Kavanaugh grew up, was raised to 21 from 18 in 1982, when he was a high school senior, and he did not turn 18 until 1983. A government-sponsored national study by the University of Michigan suggests that excessive alcohol consumption among teenagers was rampant during Kavanaugh’s adolescence, peaking in the early 1980s, when nearly 40 percent of high school seniors reported binge drinking. Still, most teens were not doing it, meaning “the behavior was not unusual but it also was by no means normative,” Levy said.

She cautioned against the attitude that heavy drinking is “no big deal” and that “boys will be boys.” Excessive drinking is closely tied to incidents of sexual assault, she said, and “that’s why there’s so much concern about college drinking.” She noted that she was not commenting on any accusations against Kavanaugh.

Kavanaugh’s own comments over the years leave little doubt that heavy drinking was a feature of his youth. On his high school yearbook page from 1983, he labeled himself the Keg City Club treasurer, noting “100 Kegs or Bust,” and the “biggest contributor” to Beach Week Ralph Club, apparently a reference to throwing up.

In a 2014 speech to Yale Law students (a transcript of which was posted on Twitter by a Washington Post reporter), Kavanaugh spoke fondly of two episodes during his time at the law school that involved heavy drinking. In one, he said, he organized a bus trip for a baseball game and night of barhopping in Boston, during which students did “group chugs” from a beer keg — “only for us to return falling out of the bus onto the front steps of Yale Law School at about 4:45 a.m.”

Another time, he said, he was at a class banquet during his final year, where he had “more than a few beers” beforehand, and a drunk friend fell and broke a table before getting up and being refused any more drinks by the bartender.

“I actually still possess a photo of him sprawled on the floor on top of the table,” Kavanaugh said.

While an undergrad at Yale, Kavanaugh joined two organizations with reputations for hard partying. One was Delta Kappa Epsilon, a fraternity that several former Yale students described as a magnet for hard-drinking athletes who liked to party and pull pranks. DKE members marched around campus with women’s underwear hanging from poles, and would print T-shirts for a drinking competition called Tang that featured “beer- and sex-inspired witticisms,” according to the Yale student newspaper. Kavanaugh also joined Truth and Courage, a secret society for seniors known largely as a drinking club.

Some fraternity brothers said they never saw Kavanaugh drinking to excess in college. Chris Munnelly, a software executive in Scottdale, Arizona, who was a freshman when Kavanaugh was a senior, said, “He was not a big drinker from my interactions with him.”

But it was during a night of drinking with a group of students in a dorm freshman year that, Ramirez claims, Kavanaugh took out his penis and pushed it toward her face. He adamantly denies it, and no other firsthand witnesses have corroborated her assertion that it was him.

Earlier, at a party in Montgomery County, Maryland, when Kavanaugh was 17 and Blasey about 15, she says she was corralled into a bedroom while on her way to an upstairs bathroom. A drunken Kavanaugh pushed her onto a bed and clumsily tried to pull her clothes off, she alleges, while his friend, Mark Judge, also intoxicated, locked the door and turned up the music.

Blasey said she managed to get away when Judge, laughing, jumped onto the bed, sending all three teenagers tumbling to the floor. Kavanaugh denies assaulting Blasey or even being at the party in question, and Judge has said he has “no recollection” of the alleged incident. Judge wrote a memoir of his own experiences with alcohol while at Georgetown Prep, “Wasted: Tales of a Gen X Drunk,” in which he described an environment of binge drinking and blackouts. The book refers to a “Bart O’Kavanaugh” who “puked in someone’s car” and “passed out on his way back from a party.” Judge did not respond to requests for comment.

Kavanaugh has never publicly dwelled on details of his high-school-era partying, but has made joking references to it, telling a group of law school students in a 2016 speech that he and his friends abided by an unofficial motto: “What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep.”

“That’s been a good thing for all of us,” he said.