Just as Christine Blasey Ford appeared to be ready to testify about her allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, The New Yorker published a new allegation likewise unsubstantiated and dating back over three decades.
“In her initial conversations with The New Yorker, she was reluctant to characterize Kavanaugh’s role in the alleged incident with certainty,” Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer reported for The New Yorker on Sunday. “After six days of carefully assessing her memories and consulting with her attorney, [Deborah] Ramirez said that she felt confident enough of her recollections to say that she remembers Kavanaugh had exposed himself at a drunken dormitory party, thrust his penis in her face, and caused her to touch it without her consent as she pushed him away.”
In response, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, issued a statement calling for the postponement of Kavanaugh’s confirmation process: “I am writing to request an immediate postponement of any further proceedings related to the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh,” she announced Sunday.
However, as The Daily Wire’s Ryan Saavedra highlighted, the new allegations raise multiple red flags, including that both The New Yorker and The New York Times were unable to find a single witness to corroborate Ramirez’s claim. Ramirez says herself that she was so intoxicated that she was “was on the floor, foggy and slurring her words,” and she admits that she was uncertain that Kavanaugh was the person who allegedly exposed himself until after six days of consulting with lawyers and counselors — and only after Democrats came looking, Farrow said in an interview Sunday.
Other outlets and reporters on the right are likewise pointing out the glaring problems in Farrow’s New Yorker article, with some contending that Farrow and Mayer have actually diminished the impact of Ford’s allegation by pushing an unsubstantiated, partisan hit piece.
“The left made a mistake with this Ramirez story,” The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel tweeted Sunday. “It isn’t just how embarrassingly flimsy it is; she was inebriated; took six days to find memories; everyone denies it. But it strongly suggests the Ford delay demands were about cooking this up. Destroys credibility all around.”
Townhall political editor Guy Benson highlighted a particularly eyebrow-raising passage from The New York Times’ report on the new allegation:
Conservative writer Erick Erickson stressed Ramirez’s eleventh-hour realization that Kavanaugh was the guy who exposed himself to her, as well as the troubling “pattern” seen in both the Ramirez and Ford accusations:
The Weekly Standard’s John McCormack issued a series of tweets and retweets highlighting all the serious problems in the report:
Related: 10 Serious Problems With New Accusations Against Kavanaugh