I arrived breathing fire. I left singing Donna Summer.
A reporter for a glossy magazine is doing a profile of me. I agreed to an interview, but as the time drew closer I felt my adrenaline and hostility rising. I was about to be attacked—again.
Except I wasn’t.
I left the interview feeling something I haven’t for years. I felt hope for journalism’s future.
I also realized that while most of my ammunition over the last several years was directed at left-wing journalists, who make up most of the profession, I finally had to admit something I’ve had trouble facing: Conservatives are also very bad at journalism.
I won’t delve into what happened during my interview. I’ll only say that we met at Georgetown University. It’s 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. Georgetown Prep is one of the reasons I became famous in 2018, and one of the reasons this reporter wanted to meet with me. On the Uber on the way over I cranked some aggressive 1980s punk into my iPods: the Clash, the Dead Kennedys, Bad Brains.
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.
Three hours later everything had changed. I felt like the writer was interested in me not as a political prop but as a human being. She’s interested in the leads I gave her. I’ve spent so many years dealing with fake journalists that I wasn’t ready for a real one.
The reason a writer for an upscale glossy wanted to talk to me was the reason I’d become famous—my involvement in the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearing. I wrote about the Kavanaugh nightmare in my book The Devil’s Triangle. In it and in subsequent articles I’ve shown that it was a nasty opposition research hit. My reporting was validated this year when David Enrich, an investigative reporter for The New York Times who wrote about Kavanaugh and me in 2008, 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 Enrich confession is news, and should’ve led to other questions. Yet there was no follow-up. I understand this on the left, who want their iniquity kept buried—as in the Russiagate hoax. More disappointing has been the dull reaction on the right. Conservative pundits are good at debating college sophomores, but not reporting. In a review of The Devil’s Triangle, The American Conservative managed to get my friends and me backwards. Several conservative journalists were writing articles and even books about the Kavanaugh nomination but showed zero interest in talking to me. One outlet, The Washington Free Beacon, had two reporters call me and we spent over an hour on the phone. The piece never ran.
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. That was me. Cooke’s miss points to conservative journalism’s problem with doing basic reporting as well as the elite right’s tendency to wall itself off, which makes too many conservatives not unlike the academic left.
In a 2024 video, Ben Shapiro describes the career of Kamala Harris from San Francisco prosecutor to her role on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Shapiro describes how a woman named “Christina” Blasey Ford came forward in 2018 to accuse SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her at a party in 1982. Shapiro says that Blasey Ford “couldn’t name anyone else at the party.” He says Blasey Ford claimed that Kavanaugh’s “drunk friends tried to rape her.” Then Shapiro claims that Ford “was reluctant to come forward.”
These are all errors. Ford’s first name is Christine, not Christina. Despite what Shapiro says, Ford did name people she claims were at the party. She didn’t claim that a bunch of Kavanaugh’s “drunk fiends” tried to rape her—she claimed he tried to take her clothes of while another boy was in the room. By saying “a bunch of drunk fiends tried to rape her,” Shapiro is conflating Ford’s story with the madness of another woman at the time who claimed that Kavanaugh and I were involved in drugging girls and gang rape. Shapiro also says that Blasey Ford was reluctant to come forward and “wanted to stay private.” Ford was also never, despite what Shapiro says, a reluctant witness. In his book We’ve Got People, Ryan Grim—the guy who broke and helped spread the news about Ford in the first place and no conservative—notes that Blasey Ford took repeated steps to come forward.
I sent the Daily Wire an email asking for corrections. Shapiro never responded.
Conservative coverage was as bad as what appeared in the liberal press—although the right never reached the slapstick highs of the left. In Vanity Fair. Writer 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 right were intent on making me the sin eater, responsible for everything insane that happened in the 1980s. The left did it to destroy Kavanaugh, the right to protect him.
Well, fuck that. It’s about time a journalist who’s fair and knows how to chase down facts came along. She later told me the interview is over 28,000 words. It was like a Rogan hit—or a classic Playboy interview. I’ve no idea what the final story will look like. I could wind up getting burned. Yet I have hope I won’t, even with no expectations that I’ll be depicted as a saint. In Jungian terms, I have integrated my shadow.
In recent days information has come out about the Russiagate hoax that’s revealed the high-level plotting behind that treasonous attempt to destroy President Trump’s first term. I believe that in a similar way, more will come out about the Blasey Ford hit—particularly when Jeff Zients, Biden’s former Chief of Staff and former Facebook executive, comes to DC to testify in September. The reporter who talked to me at Georgetown knows this.
Leaving the campus I felt hope. I switched out the punk on my iTunes and listened to a favorite Donna Summer song from the 80s.