Jane Mayer said on Monday that Deborah Ramirez, who accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexually harassing her, told her New Yorker colleague Ronan Farrow that she couldn’t be sure of the Supreme Court nominee’s guilt.
Confronted with a New York Times report indicating Ramirez expressed doubts about Kavanaugh’s guilt to former Yale classmates, Mayer said Ramirez shared those doubts before they published their bombshell report on Sunday.
“To Ronan she said she wasn’t absolutely certain, she needed to make certain before she was going to say anything publicly. She remembered the specifics, the graphic specifics, and she tried to remember for sure who that man was who was in her face,” she told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough.“With all due respect to the New York Times, which is the best paper in America, just because they couldn’t get the story and speak to her or find the person that we found, who remembered it from back then, doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
Ramirez, who opted to come forward after learning Senate Democrats were independently investigating the incident, claims Kavanaugh drunkenly thrust his penis in her face during a dorm party at Yale when he was a freshman.
Kavanaugh has vigorously denied the charge and painted it as a politically motivated smear in the same vein as the allegation that he pinned down Christine Blasey Ford and tried to remove her clothing when they were in high-school.
There are no eyewitness accounts included in the story and several of Kavanaugh’s friends and roommates from his time at Yale, some of whom were said to have been in the room, released a statement denying that the assault ever took place.
Ford and Kavanaugh are scheduled to testify publicly before the Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday.