Give credit where due. Kathleen Parker likely angered most of her paper’s readership by declaring the obvious, and indicting her own employer in the process.
Christine Blasey Ford got her second round of media adulation last month for publishing her memoir of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation she tried to derail. Parker wonders when the media will finally get around to discussing the book written by one of the victims of the unsubstantiated allegations, Mark Judge — and when the media will finally recognize Blasey Ford’s motives:
Ford, you’ll recall, is the California psychologist with two front doors in her house who, in testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2018, accused Kavanaugh of assaulting her at a high-school-era party while another boy, Mark Judge, allegedly stood by. Judge, who kept his distance and silence during Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings — in part, he has said, to avoid further harassment by Democratic interlocutors — released his own version of those events and the aftermath in “The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi” (2022).
As with Kavanaugh, Ford’s accusation against Judge was embraced by most of the news media despite an absence of evidence or corroborating testimony. No one who was supposed to have been at the party where Ford was allegedly assaulted remembered it, or her. Ford herself was unable to nail down the year the party took place (but settled on 1982 after several stabs) or where it was held, how she got there, how she got home or any other details, except that she herself had consumed just one beer, according to her testimony. Her claims against Kavanaugh ultimately were unsubstantiated. …
And what about Judge? “Roadkill” is the way constitutional lawyer Jonathan Turley described Judge’s invisible role in this tale.
That’s strong language, but Parker doesn’t stop there. She reveals that she tried researching Blasey Ford’s allegations for a book of her own “that never came to fruition,” but Parker did get a chance to take a closer look at Leland Keyser, a woman whom Blasey Ford claimed to be a witness to an assault that she could neither specifically date or place. Keyser denied ever having witnessed any such attack on Blasey Ford, either by Kavanaugh or anyone else, and told that to the FBI.
When Keyser wouldn’t budge, Parker recalls, Blasey Ford and her enablers tried intimidating her into compliance, and then smeared her over a painkiller addiction. That provides an interesting parallel to Mark himself, whose struggles with addiction ended up as media fodder for reporters responding to every crank that emerged with nonsense stories about Kavanaugh’s partying. (Remember Michael Avenatti’s attempt to use Julie Swetnick and create a nonsense allegation of Kavanaugh-led rape gangs?)
For most of us, this is old news, or at least it was until the mainstream media threw another lovefest for Blasey Ford last month. But if they’re interested in the truth, Parker rightly argues, why aren’t they revisiting Leland Keyser?
And why after two years will they still not acknowledge Mark’s book and testimony?
Both Judge and Keyser, it seems, deserve the applause Ford is receiving for perpetuating a questionable history that has damaged so many people, not to mention the judicial system she says she has sought to protect. We know the truth is otherwise, thanks to a video capture of Ford’s lawyer, Debra Katz, saying that her client wanted to block Kavanaugh because of fears he would vote to reverse Roe v. Wade. …
It takes guts to try to breach the #MeToo iron curtain, as Judge is attempting to do. It takes no courage at all to enrich yourself at other people’s expense, as Ford has done.
That’s gonna leave a mark.
Since its initial publication yesterday, Parker’s column has drawn almost six thousand comments at the Post. As you might imagine, most of them accuse Parker of selling out, but few of those address Keyser’s denials or Judge’s point of view at all. One has to wonder whether the Post’s staff will demand a retraction at some point or claim that Parker has made them “unsafe” by expressing her well-substantiated opinion in this manner. But at least for now, kudos to the Post for allowing her to skewer the Left’s Holy Martyr of 2018, and for doing what hardly any media outlet has done — refer to Judge’s book about the Kavanaugh nightmare.
His book is The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi, and it’s still available. And if you want to help support Mark’s independent journalism these days, he’s got a GoFundMe account.
Addendum: Give the Post credit in another way, too. Its previous managing editor, Marty Baron, tried to justify his paper’s coverage of the Kavanaugh mess at the time in his own 2023 memoir. Mark blasted him for ignoring the truth in a follow-up column last October:
Baron spends a decent chunk of Collision of Power writing about the Kavanaugh nomination. He mentions me by name when he cites a letter that Ford had written saying that Kavanaugh “with the assistance of a friend, Mark G. Judge,” had been involved in her assault. Had Baron read my book or the tens of columns I’ve written, he would know that even something as small as Ford referring to me as “Mark G. Judge” is a tell. Mark G. Judge was a byline I used when I was a younger journalist. That Ford would use it in the letter indicates someone was opposition researching me, not referring to someone they actually know. It’s a small detail, maybe lost in the fact that Ford could not remember the when or where of the alleged attack, but it is something Woodward and Bernstein would have noticed.
Baron does not have the integrity to mention a single article I have written. He does not mention my book. He does, however, heap praise on Emma Brown, the Washington Post reporter who broke the Blasey Ford story. Baron writes: “The Post’s reporter, Emma Brown, had focused single-mindedly on getting the facts right and checking out Ford’s account as best she could under the circumstances at the time.”
This is false.
There’s a lot of that going around with Blasey Ford. And that underscores the guts it took for Parker to point all of this out in Baron’s old newspaper.
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