Kavanaugh Was Questioned by Police After Bar Fight in 1985

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — As an undergraduate student at Yale, Brett Kavanaugh was involved in an altercation at a local bar during which he was accused of throwing ice on another patron, according to a police report.

The incident, which occurred in September 1985 during Kavanaugh’s junior year, resulted in Kavanaugh and four other men being questioned by the New Haven Police Department. Kavanaugh was not arrested, but the police report stated that a 21-year-old man accused Kavanaugh of throwing ice on him “for some unknown reason.”

A witness to the fight said that Chris Dudley, a Yale basketball player who was friends with Kavanaugh, then hit the man in the ear with a glass, according to the police report, which was obtained by The New York Times.

The report said that the victim, Dom Cozzolino, “was bleeding from the right ear” and was later treated at a local hospital. A detective was notified of the incident at 1:20 a.m.

Dudley denied the accusation, according to the report. For his part, speaking to the officers, Kavanaugh did not want “to say if he threw the ice or not,” the police report said.

The report referred to the altercation, which occurred at a bar called Demery’s, as “an assault.” It did not say whether anyone was arrested, and there is no indication that charges were filed.

The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment Monday. Dudley did not respond to phone and email messages. Reached by text message, Cozzolino declined to comment.

The outlines of the incident were first referred to in a statement issued Sunday by Chad Ludington, one of Kavanaugh’s college classmates and a member of the Yale basketball team.

“On one of the last occasions I purposely socialized with Brett, I witnessed him respond to a semi-hostile remark, not by defusing the situation, but by throwing his beer in the man’s face,” Ludington said in the statement. Ludington, a college professor at North Carolina State, said he came forward because he believed Kavanaugh had mischaracterized the extent of his drinking at Yale.

Ludington said that he had been in touch with the FBI.

He said that the altercation happened after a UB40 concert, when he and a group of people went to Demery’s and were drinking pints. At one point, they were sitting near a man who, they thought, resembled Ali Campbell, the lead singer of UB40.

“We’re trying to figure out if it’s him,” he said.

When the man noticed Ludington, Kavanaugh and the others looking at him, he objected and aggressively asked them to stop, Ludington said.

It was then, he said, that Kavanaugh “threw his beer at the guy.”

“The guy swung at Brett,” Ludington continued. At that point, Dudley “took his beer and smashed it into the head of the guy, who by now had Brett in an embrace. I then tried to pull Chris back, and a bunch of other guys tried to pull the other guy back. I don’t know what Brett was doing in the melee, but there was blood, there was glass, there was beer and there was some shouting, and the police showed up.”

Demery’s, which closed in 1994, was a well-known local bar that served big slices of pizza, and cheap beer, especially after 9 p.m. It drew a crowd that included “older Yalies and younger ones with good fake IDs,” according to thepolitic.org.

Dudley, who after Yale went on to the NBA, has spoken out in support of Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination and disputed reports that he drank excessively.

Several Yale classmates, including a former roommate and Ludington, have described Kavanaugh as sometimes aggressive when he was drinking.