On Tuesday morning, a false allegation of rape launched against Judge Brett Kavanaugh was phoned into the office of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), which passed it on to the Judiciary Committee. On Wednesday, only hours after the media jumped on the story, the man reportedly responsible for the allegations recanted his accusations, tweeting, “Do (sic) everyone who is going crazy about what I had said I have recanted because I have made a mistake and apologize for such mistake.”
Both The Hill and CNN ran with the story. The allegations stated that a rape occurred on a boat in 1985, and that a “close acquaintance” of a Rhode Island constituent “was sexually assaulted by two heavily inebriated men she referred to at the time as Brett and Mark.” That was an apparent reference to Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge. The apparent constituent of Whitehouse’s who made the phone call stated he realized that Kavanaugh was one of the men allegedly involved “when he saw Kavanaugh’s high school yearbook photo on television over the weekend.”
When the Judiciary Committee asked Kavanaugh about the Rhode Island allegation, he responded, “I was not in Newport, haven’t been on a boat in Newport. Not with Mark Judge on a boat, nor all those three things combined. This is just completely made up, or at least not me. I don’t know what they’re referring to.”
Sure enough, as Heavy reported, “A Twitter account using the name Jeffrey Catalan has issued a recantation after a Senate transcript of an interview with Brett Kavanaugh indicated that the person with the Catalan Twitter account made one of the new accusations against Kavanaugh that were widely reported by major news outlets on September 26, 2018.” Heavy added, “The Senate Judiciary Committee redacted Catalan’s name and Twitter handle in the publicly released transcripts of its interviews with Kavanaugh. However, the transcripts that detail his accusation to Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) contain verbatim quotes of tweets that still appeared on Catalan’s page as of September 26.”
The Catalan account, according to Heavy, “indicates its owner is from Tiverton, Rhode Island … He only has 19 followers and started tweeting in June 2018. The tweets are almost all angry rants against President Donald Trump (Example on July 1, 2018: ‘Hey fat man in the White house, you ever going to show your taxes. I think your a coward. Fat, lying, cheating and of low IQ president should watch he says.’)”
Even Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) has said that his staff dismisses some of the rumors that they get regarding Kavanaugh, stating, “Some of these are completely incredible and the staff dismisses it.”
But Whitehouse’s office passed the rape allegation to the Judiciary Committee.
Whitehouse has already threatened that if the Democrats win the House in the November elections, they will launch their own investigation into Kavanaugh.