Bob Schwartz

We’ve been learning the hard way how it works when people of power, prestige or celebrity are accused of bad things. Individual and isolated incidents are denied or covered up. Even if there is a smattering of proof, this keeps the focus away from the more important issues of patterns of behavior or bad character. In fact, when you bolster with endorsements of “good character”, the impact of the individual incidents is softened, and a pattern of behavior becomes unthinkable.

We have reached the point in the Brett Kavanaugh consideration where individual incidents are being set aside or shot down, just as evidence of a pattern of behavior or bad character is creeping in. That evidence isn’t even new. His high school drinking and debauchery buddy Mark Judge has written in his memoir about drunken exploits with his thinly disguised pal “Bart O’Kavanagh”. Judge will not be questioned, and merely says that he was given to frequent alcoholic blackouts (in high school and for years to come), and so he has no memory of the particular incident. Which begs the question of whether he and Kavanaugh engaged in a pattern of drunken and drugged exploitation of young women—something Judge no doubt remembers, even in an alcoholic haze.

It took years—decades—for the sordid past to catch up with Cosby, Weinstein, and others. Astonishingly, the sordid past still hasn’t caught up with Trump. If you ask Republicans, we have literally days to decide whether Kavanaugh has the character to serve on the Supreme Court. There is evidence that he does not, and it is something that can be determined only by a true due diligence review of the individual incidents, of a pattern of behavior and of character. There is no need to rush to judgment, and every reason to pause.