Brett Kavanaugh, Christine Blasey Ford, and the case of the compartmentalized rapist — a meditation

It's possible that when Robert Louis Stevenson wrote this book 

he was on to something bigger than he guessed. [Illustration via

Wikimedia Commons.]

Back in the early 1980s, about the same time that Christine Blasey Ford says she was sexually abused by Brett Kavanaugh in the DC area, an advertising colleague of mine, a suit-and-tie kind of guy from the account management side, got arrested for rape in New Jersey. 

And not just for one rape. He was accused — and later convicted — for being a serial rapist. His modus operandi was to hide in the bushes in a park, and then jump out and attack women who were jogging by themselves.

Shock and disbelief

He was a husky, good-looking, college-educated midwesterner — and his arrest threw many of his women co-workers into shock. True, we were working for a small oddball advertising agency that was exceptionally laggard in cleaning up its sexist behavior. But he was not perceived as one of the male chauvinists.

“He was the only guy in account management who looked out for us,” one of the young women on staff told me. “He treated us fairly. He mentored me. I worked late with him lots of times. So did other women. We trusted him.”

I recalled a conversation he and I had, perhaps a year before that, when almost out of the blue he asked if I thought some rape victims were “asking for it.”

“No," I replied. "I mean, asking how could they ask for it? Who asks to get raped?” 

“Well, you know…just asking for it.”

Mentor or predator?

That brief conversation helps explain to me how a “nice guy” who helped and mentored his women co-workers could also be a brutal sexual predator.

 In an office setting he was always a perfect gentleman, and always a kindly mentor to the women  he knew. But the office setting, office attire, and office behavior were in just one compartment of his mind. A strange woman in nylon jogging shorts, her bare legs exposed, running through the park, was in another compartment, the “asking for it” compartment. And therefore she was fair game for rape. 

He was Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde, depending on which mental compartment was open for business at the moment.

By the way, I looked him up on the Internet before starting to write this. He’s out of prison now, living in New Jersey, looking middle-aged and overweight. His time in prison seems to have given him a thuggish look. I found him and his photograph on a registered sex offender website.

A hypothesis about Kavanaugh

So what does he have to do with Brett Kavanaugh? Bear with me a bit more while I explain a hypothesis.

Many people somehow sort others into distinctively separate compartments There might be a “nice” compartment and and “asking for it” compartment. Or there might be “matters to me” and “insignificant to me” compartments.

I’ve had male friends who’ve had brief extramarital flings and didn’t quite grasp the shocked and furious response of their wives, because the affairs these guys had “didn’t mean anything.” The guys sincerely didn’t understand, at least not on a visceral level, why their wives were upset by what they saw as a "trivial" affair.

Which brings me finally to Kavanaugh. Do I believe that he is mostly straight arrow, goes to church every Sunday, loves his family, teaches his daughter to pray, and never tells off-color jokes in mixed company? Absolutely.

I also believe Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony that Kavanaugh yanked her into a bedroom when they were both teen-agers, tried unsuccessfully to pull her clothing off, forcibly ran his hands over her body, covered her mouth with his hand so that she couldn't scream for help, ground his hips against her — and then laughed about it with a friend. 

Ford's testimony about the laughter between Kavanaugh and another friend tells me something. It says that Ford was in an “insignificant” compartment, unlike the 45 or so women who were former Catholic prep school or law colleagues of Kavanaugh, and who wrote in support of him. 

Ford simply didn’t matter all that much to him. Little wonder Kavanaugh can claim none of this happened. Even if he was cold sober, Ford fit in the wrong compartment, and was therefore easily forgotten. 

Or perhaps Kavanaugh does remember, at least a little bit. No matter. In either case, how outrageous it must seem that someone from the compartment reserved for people who don't matter can emerge after three decades from nowhere important to sully his name and damage his career.

Tirades and tears

And so Kavanaugh launches into a raging tirade before a Congressional committee, alternately red-faced and weeping. I believe both the rage and the tears. I believe he is apoplectically furious that this person, a woman of no significance to him, has the temerity to ruin his reputation. And I believe his weepy self-pitying disbelief that somebody from the Nobody Compartment has done this to him.

I also believe he has no place on any Federal bench, whether in an appeals court or the Supreme Court. Neither the tears, nor the tirades, nor the allegations of drunkenness, nor the very believable ones of sexual predation comport with judicial temperament.

Eleven reasons why Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh is not guilty of sexual abuse (as overheard by The New York Crank while listening to the news)

Brett Kavanaugh swearing about something else.
Photo: Wikimedia commons

By now,  you must be from Mars if you don’t know that a college professor named Christine Blasey Ford has accused Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s choice for the next seat on the Supreme Court, of sexual abuse.

Here’s why any red-blooded American can ignore the charges and cheer on Senate Republicans as they ram through Kavanaugh’s confirmation before some damn FBI investigation gets in the way and accidentally reveals a bunch of stupid facts.

1. Kavanaugh says he didn’t do it. Since everybody says he’s a “family man,” what more evidence of his innocence do you need?

2. Even if he did do it, he did it when he was still a high school student, so it doesn’t count because boys will be boys. 

3. It happened so many years ago that the statute of limitations has expired, therefore it doesn’t count. Not that anybody’s saying he did it. They’re just saying.

4. 65-or-so of Kavanaugh's closest high school women friends “spontaneously” wrote to say they know Brett Kavanaugh and he’s  a straight arrow. Anybody who had 65 close women friends in high school and who can get them all to say he’s a great guy, is a guy who couldn’t possibly have tried to commit rape because, umm, uh, something something something. Right?

5. Maybe it happened, but somebody else did it. In fact, the person who did do it is Kavanaugh's evil twin, whose name is Doppelgänger Kavanaugh.

6. The FBI should not be invited to investigate, because investigating stuff is so not what the FBI does. Even President Trump says so. Besides, if Kavanaugh had done it, they would have investigated, but since they didn’t investigate, there’s nothing to investigate, otherwise they would have investigated.

7. The fact that Ford took and passed a lie detector test proves nothing, since lie detector tests are not admissible in court. Even though there is no court. Of course, if she flunked a lie detector test, that would be another matter entirely. Ditto, if Kavanaugh took a lie detector test and passed. But he won’t take a lie detector test because he’s innocent, so why should he have to take it? (Not that he wouldn’t pass it if he did take it.)

8. The Drudge Report says Ford is a “mad” and a “troubled” professor. Therefore Kavanaugh couldn’t possibly have tried to rape her.

9. She got lousy review on Rate My Professors dot com. Of course, the websites Grabien and the Gateway Pundit, which pointed out those lousy ratings, failed to point out that they had the wrong Professor Ford at the wrong university. But both last names begin with the letter F, so close enough, right? Especially since one student rated the wrong Professor Ford as “the worst teacher I ever had.” What other proof would you need that the other Professor Ford is lying about a sexual assault?

10. The charges against Kavanaugh should be investigated by an impartial outside counsel appointed and approved by the Republican majority of  a Senate Judiciary Committee. How much more impartial can you get?

11. It’s a mere coincidence that Garrett Ventry, who was a Senate Whitewash Committee’s — I mean Judiciary Committee’s  — aide has stepped down after denying evidence that he was fired from a different political job in part because of a sexual  harassment allegation against him. In fact he denies that he’s any more guilty than Kavanaugh but resigned “to avoid causing any distraction from the work of the committee." Because, you know, nothing will distract you from looking into sex more than sex will distract you from looking into sex. Or something like that. 

And furthermore: I've just belatedly come across Franklin Graham's weigh-in on this matter. “Well, there wasn’t a crime that was committed. These are two teenagers and it’s obvious that she said no and he respected it and walked away.” Obvious how? Not according to Kavanaugh, who says it never happened at all. And certainly not according to Kristine Blasey Ford, who says he lay on top of her, put his hand over her mouth so she couldn't scream, felt her up and dry humped her. So where does Graham come off with his analysis? My best guess is, in a moment of divine inspiration, he averaged "never happened" with "sexual abuse" and came up a harmless incident in which Kavanaugh gave it the old high school try and she said no, so he left. And also, I am Film Commissioner by Popular Acclaim for the planet Uranus.

More and more I'm thinking that the Republicans feel such a terrible urgency to silence Kristine Blasey Ford and hide the whole thing under the rug because there's much worse — much much worse — still capable of coming out.