In the course of calling former classmates to corroborate her claim that Brett Kavanaugh drunkenly exposed himself to her at a dorm party, Deborah Ramirez told a number of them that she wasn’t entirely sure that Kavanaugh was responsible, the New York Times reported Sunday.
“The Times had interviewed several dozen people over the past week in an attempt to corroborate her story, and could find no one with firsthand knowledge,” the Times reported. “Ms. Ramirez herself contacted former Yale classmates asking if they recalled the incident and told some of them that she could not be certain Mr. Kavanaugh was the one who exposed himself.”
Ramirez went public in a Sunday New Yorker article with the accusation that Kavanaugh, then a freshman at Yale, thrust his penis in her face while playing a drinking game. The article does not include any eyewitness accounts and several of Kavanaugh’s college friends and roommates disputed the claim in a statement.
“We were the people closest to Brett Kavanaugh during his first year at Yale. He was a roommate to some of us, and we spent a great deal of time with him, including in the dorm where this incident allegedly took place. Some of us were also friends with Debbie Ramirez during and after her time at Yale. We can say with confidence that if the incident Debbie alleges ever occurred, we would have seen or heard about it—and we did not,” the statement read in part.
One former classmate told the New Yorker that he remembers being told about the incident at the time.
In an interview on ABC’s Good Morning America Monday, Ronan Farrow, who co-authored the article with Jane Mayer, said Ramirez only chose to come forward after learning that Senate Democrats had learned of the incident independently and were investigating.
The latest accusation comes after Christine Blasey Ford alleged that Kavanaugh pinned her down and tried to remove her clothing when they were high-school students.
Kavanaugh and Ford are both scheduled to testify publicly before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday.