The text wasn’t completely unexpected. Still, I was shocked.
Last year, a writer named Cathy Alter asked to do a profile of me for Washingtonian magazine. Cathy and I have been friendly for more than three decades, and I said yes. Of course, I suspected the topic would be about my involvement in the Brett Kavanaugh nomination circus. Yet Cathy surprised me. We met for the first time at Georgetown University, and she asked me non-political questions - what frightened me, what I believed in, my favorite things in life. Human interest topics. Of course, I was also asked about Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who in 2018 accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault - and said I was in the room when it happened. Still, Cathy won me over a little bit. We met two more times, and I drove her around the places in Maryland where I grew up. She interviewed several of my oldest and closest friends. More than once, she said that she has known for decades that while I’m a flawed person, I’m also a kind and conscientious one.
Then, nothing. And on March 31, a text from Cathy:
Hey there. I wanted to tell you as soon as I heard (in a phone call today with the editor), Washingtonian is killing the story. I’m tied up now with a list of crap to finish but I wanted to let you know. How about I take some of my kill fee and treat you to a fancy meal? I’m really sorry. And really disappointed.
I pressed Cathy on why the profile was spiked, but she shut down, telling me I would have “to ask the editor.” Of course, the reason is obvious. Cathy Alter made me look human, and in the pages of the Washingtonian, an elite D.C. glossy, the friend of Brett Kavanaugh who exposed the media in his book The Devil’s Triangle can’t be made to look human.
I asked Cathy if she would release the interview we conducted at Georgetown, which was recorded and is over an hour long. I also want to let Cathy know that her piece can still be published. This is the age of Substack and alternative media like Quillette and The Free Press. Cathy Alter is a hugely successful journalist who has appeared in Oprah magazine and on Good Morning America. She’s a great writer. Surely her piece could find a home.
I’ve written about the Kavanaugh nightmare a lot in the last few years, including my book The Devil’s Triangle. I continue to write about the events of 2018 because there was a sinister and illegal plot to take Kavanaugh and me down, and I still want some answers. My reporting was validated recently when David Enrich, an investigative reporter for The New York Times who wrote about the story in 2018, apologized to me. “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my role in the Kavanaugh coverage,” Enrich told me after I confronted him, “and I would be happy to talk to you about it at some point. For now, I will just say that I have learned some lessons and would probably do certain things differently next time.” Then he texted me this: “I can’t imagine what it was like for you to go thru that.” The Times then issued its official response: ”Mr. Judge’s claims about our reporters’ practices are not accurate. The Times’s reporting on Justice Kavanaugh’s nomination and confirmation process was thorough, independent, and fair, and we stand behind it.”
Enrich’s comments came after I was interviewed by Martha MacCallum for the documentary, Judge and the Justice, on Fox Nation. Kathleen Parker, at the Washington Post, also wrote a column defending me. I also reviewed Christine Blasé Ford’s book One Way Back, raising questions that the media have ignored.
After spending so much time with Cathy, I felt something I haven’t for years. I felt hope for journalism’s future. We first met at Georgetown University, where I was born, my grandfather coached baseball, and where my brother died. It’s also a Jesuit school and the big brother to Georgetown Prep, where I went to high school with Brett Kavanaugh. I thought about recording the interview, like my interlocutor. I understand how conservatives want to protect themselves against the liberal media by preemptively attacking reporters before they can malign you, the way Dave Portnoy did to a Washington Post reporter. And in fact, I made a move towards a preemptive strike by anticipating what was going to happen. I decided to do it commando, no recording. Cathy, however, did record our conversation. That audio should be released.
I felt like Cathy was interested in me, not as a political prop but as a human being. In 2018, National Review senior writer Charles Cooke argued that the 2018 attack on Kavanaugh, when a mob formed and attempted to disregard due process and the presumption of innocence, might hurt an innocent person in the future. “Sometime soon,” Cooke wrote, “the hideous standards that were crafted and reinforced by those attempting to bring down Kavanaugh will be used against someone with no power, money, name recognition, or institutional backing.”In fact those “hideous standards” were already deployed against someone without power, money, name recognition or institutional standards. Me.
Of course, the coverage of me was ridiculous. In Vanity Fair, Evgenia Peretz came up with this beauty to describe me in the 1980s: “Judge took the cake. He was the loudest, edgiest, baddest ass. He was also the heartthrob. In Breakfast Club terms, you might say he had the dangerous allure of Judd Nelson’s Bender combined with the popularity of Emilio Estevez’s Andrew Clark. His body couldn’t contain his energy. He would leap onto people’s backs to start games of chicken. He could place his hands on a banister and jettison his body over an entire stairwell.” The Vanity Fair piece also quoted a woman named Evie Shapiro, who claimed to have gone to college with me at Catholic University. One problem: Evie Shapiro went to the University of Maryland. The Daily Wire found a lot more mistakes.
The left and even the right were intent on making me the sin eater, responsible for everything insane that happened in the 1980s.
I thought Cathy could be the journalist who’s fair and knows how to chase down facts - and in fact she probably was, although we may never know. She told me our Georgetown interview is over 28,000 words. It was like a Rogan hit—or a classic Playboy interview. We talked about trauma a lot, and what I was like as a kid.
Of course, I pressed to get my own answers. I told Cathy I’d like to know more about Monica McLean, a figure who’s escaped all media scrutiny. McLean’s a former FBI agent who was in the news in 2018. She was Christine Blasey Ford’s best friend going back to fifth grade, was by Blasey Ford’s side at the Kavanaugh hearing, and was anonymous until an ex-boyfriend of Ford’s claimed that Ford had helped McLean prepare for her FBI polygraph test. The man who says he dated Ford in the mid-1990s wrote that he “witnessed Dr. Ford help Monica McLean prepare for a polygraph examination.” McLean was outraged: “I have never had anyone assist me with the preparation of any polygraph. Ever. Not my entry polygraph, not my 5-year reinvestigation polygraphs. Never. I am extremely angry he would make this up,” she told CNN.
McLean was also accused of witness tampering when a woman named Leland Keyser, who Ford said was at the party where she was assaulted, denied the story or even knowing Brett Kavanaugh. There were text messages from McLean to Keyser asking Keyser to change her story, a person familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal. McLean’s lawyer, David Laufman, issued a statement: “Any notion or claim that Ms. McLean pressured Leland Keyser to alter Ms. Keyser’s account of what she recalled concerning the alleged incident between Dr. Ford and Brett Kavanaugh is absolutely false.”
McLean was one of the “beach friends” Blasey Ford mentioned when asked who helped her prepare her explosive 2018 letter accusing Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct. Shortly after Kavanaugh was nominated, McLean cut off all ties with Ford and went silent. The people I’ve spoken to who know Ford and McLean all expressed shock that McLean will no longer speak to Ford. In her “memoir” One Way Back, Blasey Ford refers to McLean as “Tory” and briefly notes that Tory will not return her messages. Why?
For the entire summer of 2018, Ford had been working with an opposition researcher named Keith Koegler. According to The Education of Brett Kavanaugh, written by New York Times reporters Kate Kelly and Robin Pogrebin, Koegler had “spent many hours that summer poring over news coverage of the nomination process, biographical information about Kavanaugh, and writings and videos produced by Mark Judge. In combing through YouTube, articles, and social networks, Koegler had learned more about the house parties… and the lexicon of 1980s Georgetown Prep than he had ever thought he would care to know.”
I’d like to know more about this, but no reporter so far has asked.
Aside from McLean, Laufman, and Koegler, there’s also the crazy stuff that happened to me. On September 24, 2018, I got a sinister phone message from a California number. A reptilian voice on the other end told me I was about to be messed with (the caller used more colorful language), and then abruptly shifted to a slightly softer tone: “Hey, give me a call. We’ll work something out.” This was flat-out extortion, witness-tampering, Mafia-style strong-arming.
It’s all dramatic stuff that makes for good copy. Last December, the art director of Washingtonian sent me an email saying they were setting me up with a photographer, and it would have to be done quickly - maybe a picture of me skateboarding. Then, suddenly, silence.
I’m not stupid enough to think that I was going to come across as a saint. Cathy laid out what we both know are the ground rules. Nasty things could be said about me. Things I’m convinced are true might not be, and I can’t tell her what to write. Still, perhaps I could at least get on the record questions I think any good journalist would want answered.
Now we’ll never know.
Editor's note: Mark has heard from other outlets interested in publishing Cathy’s piece and posting the full audio of their interview. Hot Air would also like to consider the profile.
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