Mark Judge’s Name Keeps Coming Up. Here’s What We Know.

Two women who have accused Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct at parties as a teenager have both named the same man as being present at the time: Mark Judge.

A high school friend of Kavanaugh, Judge has quickly become a significant but elusive figure. His name was repeatedly brought up Thursday during testimony by one of the women, Christine Blasey Ford, and Kavanaugh before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

But Judge has avoided the public spotlight in recent weeks, holed up at a Delaware beach house, denying the allegations through a lawyer.

Democratic senators pressed Kavanaugh about his relationship with Judge and lamented that he had not been called as a witness by the Republican majority that controls the process.

Judge is now an author, filmmaker and journalist who has written for conservative publications including The Daily Caller and The Weekly Standard. He had active profiles on Facebook and YouTube until his name surfaced in recent weeks, but those pages have since been removed. News stories have focused on “Wasted,” a memoir he published in 1997, which describes his alcohol-fueled years as a student at Georgetown Preparatory School in Maryland, where he was Kavanaugh’s close friend and classmate.

Kavanaugh has repeatedly denied the allegations made by Blasey and a second woman, Julie Swetnick, as well as an accusation by a Yale classmate, Deborah Ramirez, that he exposed himself to her at a drunken college party.

On Thursday, Blasey, who also goes by her married name, Ford, repeated her accusations under oath, including her allegation about Judge’s role, stating that he was in the room at a home in suburban Maryland in the early 1980s when a drunken Kavanaugh pinned her on a bed, grabbed at her body and clothes, and covered her mouth to keep her from screaming.

She also said music was playing in the room when one of them pushed her into it, and that one of the teenagers had turned it up. She describes a drunk Judge as a jumpy and at times conflicted accomplice to assault.

“Both Brett and Mark were drunkenly laughing during the attack. They seemed to be having a very good time,” Blasey said. “Mark seemed ambivalent, at times urging Brett on and at times telling him to stop. A couple of times I made eye contact with Mark and thought he might try to help me, but he did not.”

She said she had never forgotten that — “the uproarious laughter between the two and their having fun at my expense.

“I was underneath one of them while the two laughed,” she testified. “Two friends having a really good time together.”

Blasey said Judge jumped on top of them twice, which caused everyone to tumble off the bed and onto the floor the second time. That gave her an opening to get out of the room and hide in a bathroom, she said.

“I heard Brett and Mark leave the bedroom laughing and loudly walk down the narrow stairs, pinballing off the walls on the way down,” she said, adding that when she could no longer hear them, she ran downstairs and left the house.

Weeks later, Blasey testified, she saw Judge working at a Safeway grocery store in Potomac, Maryland.

“I said ‘hello’ to him,” Blasey testified. “His face was white and very uncomfortable saying ‘hello’ back.” She added, “He was just nervous and not really wanting to speak with me, and he looked a little bit ill.”

Judge has disputed this account. In an interview with The New York Times before Blasey’s name became public, Judge described high school parties he attended as being mostly small, saying they took place after football games in basements while parents were asleep upstairs.

“I never saw anything like that,” Judge said in the interview. “The way it was described is even bizarre, about turning up the music and all this other stuff. It’s no situation I recall ever being in.”

Judge suggested the allegations were driven by politics. “Any intelligent person knows what’s motivating it,” he said.

Certain details of Blasey’s account resemble his own broad portrait of high school years filled with binge drinking and accounts by former Georgetown Prep students who attended the all-boys school at the same time.

In their 1983 yearbook, a photo of football players in pads and uniform showed Judge and Kavanaugh grinning side by side. The yearbook page for Judge mentions that he was a member of the club “100 KEGS or Bust” and includes the quotation, “Certain women should be struck regularly, like gongs.”

Some former classmates of the two men have said that aspects of Blasey’s recollections of Judge range true.

The book describes a person named “Bart O’Kavanaugh” as having “puked in someone’s car the other night” and “passed out on his way back from a party.” A former classmate of Kavanaugh’s said the judge earned the nickname “Bart” after a Georgetown Prep teacher garbled his name.

In the hearing Thursday afternoon, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., pressed Kavanaugh about the “Bart O’Kavanaugh” passage. Kavanaugh said the book was a “fictionalized” account and that only Judge could answer about his intention.

A statement by Swetnick painted a similar portrait of the two young men as “attached to the hip” in high school and made allegations of parties where women were drugged and “gang raped.”

Swetnick has not been interviewed by journalists or offered corroboration of her account. On Wednesday, Judge denied her allegations through his lawyer, Barbara Van Gelder.

Under questioning Thursday afternoon, Kavanaugh said he became friends with Judge starting in ninth grade and they shared the same group of friends. Judge was popular in school, Kavanaugh said, and a talented writer.

But Judge later developed a serious addiction that lasted decades, he said, and was near death a couple of times. He “suffered tremendously,” Kavanaugh said, adding that they had not talked in several years but might have been included on mass emails sent among old friends.