Late Wednesday morning, Julie Swetnick, a decorated employee of the federal government, claimed that she had witnessed Brett Kavanaugh and Mark Judge sexually assaulting women at house parties in the early 1980s. In a sworn declaration, Swetnick further suggested that at such parties Kavanaugh and Judge regularly participated in gang rapes of inebriated young women.
Swetnick’s incendiary allegations have yet to be corroborated. But Mark Judge’s ex-girlfriend, Elizabeth Rasor, had previously told the The New Yorker that “Judge had told her ashamedly of an incident that involved him and other boys taking turns having sex with a drunk woman.” And, earlier this week, the documentary filmmaker Alexandra Lescaze — who attended a D.C. private school in the early 1980s (and thus, moved in similar circles as Judge and Kavanaugh) — wrote in Slate that gang rapes of drunk women were a regular occurrence at parties in that era.
If Swetnick fabricated the allegations in her sworn affidavit, she could be found guilty of perjury. As a government employee, who requires an active security clearance to perform her work, a perjury conviction could end her career. If she is inventing stories for attention or partisan gain, she’s taking an awfully big risk to do so.
