The Boys' Club That Protects Brett Kavanaugh

By Emily Witt, The New Yorker

23 September 18

C-SPAN clip has been circulating online. It dates from September 6th, the third day of the Senate hearings to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. In the video, John Neely Kennedy, the Republican senator from Louisiana, asked Kavanaugh about his time at Georgetown Preparatory School, the Jesuit boys’ school he attended.

“I can tell from your testimony those were formative years for you,” Kennedy said, in his Southern drawl.

“Very formative,” Kavanaugh replied.

In a statement following his nomination, on July 9th, Kavanaugh referred to the Georgetown Prep motto, “Men for others.” Several dozen of his former classmates signed a letter to the leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee, saying that “he remains the same grounded and approachable person that we met in High School.”

“What was it like for you?” Kennedy asked. “What were you like?”

Kavanaugh appeared to blush slightly. He made eye contact and nodded at someone unseen. He half laughed, as if unsure whether the question was serious.

“Were you a John-Boy Walton type, or a Ferris Bueller type?” Kennedy probed.

Kavanaugh laughed more, encouraged by others laughing around him, but he didn’t answer. By all indications, he was not the bookish, responsible John-Boy Walton. (That more accurately describes Justice Neil Gorsuch, who also graduated from Georgetown Prep.) Kavanaugh said, “I loved sports, first and foremost.” He played football and basketball. He furrowed his brow as he became more reflective. He worked hard at school, he continued. He had a lot of friends. Some of his friends had been attending the hearings.

“You left out the trouble part. I was waiting for that,” Kennedy said.

Kavanaugh looked uncomfortable. “Uh, right,” he said. “That’s encompassed under the friends.” He tried smiling again.

“Now, see, I was going to ask the judge, if not him but any of his underage running buddies tried to sneak a few beers past Jesus or something like that in high school,” Kennedy said. “But I’m not going to go there.” Kavanaugh smiled.

Ten days later, Christine Blasey Ford, a psychology professor at Palo Alto University, publicly accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her at a high-school house party in Bethesda, Maryland. Ford described Kavanaugh as “stumbling drunk” at the time of the assault. He has flatly denied the accusation. His defenders point out that she dates the assault to thirty-six years ago, when Kavanaugh was only a teen-ager. But Kavanaugh has made his high-school years a very prominent part of his personal narrative. In a speech three years ago at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law, Kavanaugh said, “What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep,” adding, of himself and his friends, “That’s been a good thing for all of us, I think.” When he answered Kennedy in the Senate hearings, Kavanaugh mentioned that Jim Fegan, his high-school football coach, had texted him just three nights before, and that since being nominated he’s been running on the Georgetown Prep track on the weekends. Some people put high school behind them. Kavanaugh has not.

Kavanaugh managed to avoid testifying on whether he snuck a few beers past Jesus. But, as has been widely reported, the inside jokes on his high-school yearbook page list him as the treasurer of the “Keg City Club” and a member of the “Beach Week Ralph Club,” and make reference to “100 Kegs or Bust.” Close readers of his yearbook page have debated whether “Have You Boofed Yet?” refers to the practice of anally ingesting alcohol or drugs. According to many graduates of Washington prep schools, the party culture described in yearbooks often created occasions for sexual harassment and assault. More than a thousand women who attended Holton-Arms, the girls’ school from which Ford graduated, have signed a letter that describes the alleged assault as “all too consistent with stories we heard and lived while attending Holton. Many of us are survivors ourselves.”

Now the rest of us are learning about the hierarchy of Washington private schools—about what it meant, in the eighties, to go to Georgetown Prep as opposed to Landon or Gonzaga, and about the girls’ schools Stone Ridge, Visitation, and Holton-Arms. By all appearances, the kids from these prep schools almost exclusively socialize with one another, and that social network informs their identities for the rest of their lives. As reporters have investigated Kavanaugh’s high-school years, many alumni have expressed fear about going on the record and alienating themselves from a close-knit community. “I guess you could call it a fraternity between a bunch of rich kids,” an anonymous alumnus of Georgetown Prep, who overlapped with Kavanaugh there, told the Huff Post. “All this shit happens, and then nobody really wants to talk about it, because if one person crumbles, the whole system crumbles, and everybody tells on everybody.” I spoke with another Georgetown Prep alumnus, who hated high school but still didn’t want to go on the record about what it was like there. Even for those who take less pride in the institution, what happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep.

In 1990, seven years after Kavanaugh graduated, four students were expelled from the school for participating in a hazing ritual called “butting.” According to the Washington Post, which reported on the fallout from the expulsions, in the ritual, “a student is held down while another student places his naked buttocks close to the victim’s face.” One of the students, whose father was an alumnus, filed a lawsuit with his parents contesting his expulsion, arguing that he and his classmates had taken the fall for a common practice at the school. When a county judge rejected the lawsuit, the boy’s father, who told the Post that nineteen family members had attended Georgetown Prep, said, “I don’t think too kindly of the school,” adding that he planned to have his name struck from the alumni rolls. It was an extraordinary display of privilege, and of the protections that people think they will receive for expressing loyalty to an institution.

During the past week, Georgetown Prep has defended its reputation, publishing a letter from its president, the Reverend James Van Dyke, to “the Prep Community.” It is a strange document, in which Van Dyke describes this as “a time to continue our ongoing work with the guys on developing a proper sense of self and a healthy understanding of masculinity, in contrast to so many of the cultural models and caricatures that they see.” The reasons for any bad behavior, it seems, lie outside the school. “That we are elite, we cannot deny,” he writes. “That we are privileged, we also cannot deny.” But, Van Dyke continues, “We are not entitled, and one of the most important lessons we strive to live and teach our students is an ethic of service and compassion and solidarity with those in need.” Georgetown Prep students are framed not as citizens but as benevolent patriarchs: their good behavior is a form of service. Van Dyke speaks of a need to show “respect for women and other marginalized people.” These are unfortunate constructions. Before the alleged assault, Ford wasn’t necessarily “marginalized”; she wasn’t “in need.”

What Kavanaugh appears to have been taught, as a young person, is that goodness is working at a soup kitchen or volunteering on a mission to a poorer country; it’s granted to other people as an act of charity. Meanwhile, less good behavior would be tolerated, as long as it happened under the veil of drunkenness, or as a joke. The Jesuit fathers would turn a blind eye to the yearbook, and U.S. senators would chuckle at frat-boy antics. In this world, high school doesn’t end when you’re eighteen; it’s a lifelong circle of mutual support, an in-crowd that protects itself.

One quote on Kavanaugh’s yearbook page is an apparent reference to his friend Mark Judge, who Ford says was in the room when Kavanaugh assaulted her. Judge, who says he has “no memory” of the incident and that he does not want to testify, is the author of a 1997 memoir called “Wasted: Tales of a Gen X Drunk.” The quote is from Benjamin Franklin; the emphasis is Kavanaugh’s: “He that would live in peace and at ease must not speak all he knows, nor JUDGE all he sees.” The next few days will show whether Kavanaugh was right to place his faith in this system.