The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 109 - Kavanaugh Accusations Flimsy, Michael Avenatti and Media Malpractice

00:00:00.000 Hope you guys had a great weekend. Um, I, uh, I had a good weekend. As you can see,

00:00:04.120 I'm showing off my Ravens pride here a little bit. Uh, Ravens had a big, big win over the

00:00:08.860 Denver Broncos. And I think after that performance, uh, my Baltimore Ravens are probably the best team

00:00:16.260 in, um, not only in the league now, but probably the best team in the history of professional

00:00:23.140 sports. So, and then if they, if they lose next week against the Steelers, then, then they'll be

00:00:28.360 the worst team in my mind. And that's, that's what, if you're, if you're a sports fan, it's a

00:00:32.140 very bipolar experience because your team is always either the best team or the worst team.

00:00:37.740 Um, recently the Ravens have been the worst team a lot, uh, because they've been losing quite a bit,

00:00:42.400 but anyway, hope you guys, uh, had a good weekend. So let's talk about, um, well, it was clear to any

00:00:50.840 observant person that the Democrats were stalling last, last week to give themselves more of an

00:00:56.640 opportunity to conjure up another accuser against Brett Kavanaugh and all of the back and forth

00:01:02.300 about the particulars relating to Christine Ford testifying, uh, the discussions about who would

00:01:06.840 go first, about how many commit cameras would be there, uh, about who, you know, about all that

00:01:11.700 kind of stuff about whether, um, Christine Ford should have to fly because apparently at the last

00:01:16.480 minute, she decided that she was afraid of flying. You know, all of that was nothing but a delay

00:01:22.520 tactic and a transparent delay tactic to give the Democrats more time to do what they did last

00:01:28.740 night. And what they did last night is they whipped together another accusation. And guys, this one is

00:01:35.040 even flimsier than the first one. I mean, this one makes the first one seem credible by comparison.

00:01:39.760 And I didn't think that the first one was all that credible in the first place. Well, actually we

00:01:43.740 have two new accusations sort of, okay. So, um, the first one, uh, uh, Michael Avenatti, the stormy

00:01:52.000 Daniels lawyer, the creepy porn lawyer, as Tucker Carlson called him, he is now claiming that he is

00:02:00.300 aware of quote, significant evidence that Kavanaugh was basically the ringleader of some kind of like,

00:02:07.360 um, rape gang that would go around to house parties in the suburban DC area in the eighties.

00:02:15.140 And they would just take turns raping women. This, this, this is what he's, this is what he's now

00:02:19.760 claiming. Um, we should also mention if it wasn't clear already that Michael Avenatti is quite possibly

00:02:26.300 the scummiest person on the political scene today. And that, as you know, I mean, that is saying

00:02:32.140 something he's got a lot of competition, uh, for, for, for, for that title, especially in his own

00:02:38.120 party, but even in the other party as well. But, um, but I think that quite possibly is true. Now

00:02:44.100 we'll just, we're just going to ignore his accusations and, and move on to, uh, the piece

00:02:48.560 published by the New Yorker written by Ronan Farrow, who is the guy responsible for a lot of the

00:02:55.040 different, um, me too reports on, uh, you know, he he's, he's reported on several high profile me too

00:03:01.660 cases. And usually his reporting has been pretty solid. This though, this is not solid. Now I'm

00:03:10.360 going to go through some of, um, this New Yorker article and we will analyze it together because

00:03:17.640 I want you to, if you, if you haven't read the article, um, I want you to just get an idea.

00:03:23.560 I want you to understand to kind of see just how desperate and dishonest the opposition to Kavanaugh

00:03:29.100 has become because what's happened to Kavanaugh now, this makes, this makes the Robert Bork

00:03:34.680 treatment look gentle by comparison. So we're going to have to change the name because we used

00:03:40.720 to say that if a, if a, uh, if a Supreme court nominee is destroyed by the other party, we say

00:03:48.940 he got Borked. Well, now we're going to have to say Kavanaugh, even though Bork, you know,

00:03:52.800 the last name Bork makes for a better verb than Bork sounds better than Kavanaugh. But, um, this is

00:03:59.760 this, this, I think is even worse than what happened to Bork. So, um, let me read a little

00:04:04.140 bit from this piece. It says the woman at the center of the story, Deborah Ramirez, who is 53

00:04:09.740 attended Yale with Kavanaugh, where she studied sociology and psychology. Later, she spent years

00:04:15.320 working for an organization that supports victims of domestic violence. The New Yorker contacted

00:04:19.160 Ramirez after learning of her possible involvement in an incident involving Kavanaugh. The allegation

00:04:24.800 was also conveyed to democratic senators by a civil rights lawyer for Ramirez. The sudden attention has

00:04:29.840 become, has been unwelcome and prompted difficult choices. She, now it's, it's, it's been reported

00:04:35.380 elsewhere that, um, she came forward with a story when Democrats came looking for it, which shouldn't

00:04:42.860 be a surprise. They've been looking for this dirt. And so that's why she's speaking now. She was at first

00:04:48.740 hesitant to speak publicly, partly because her memories contained gaps, um, because she'd been

00:04:55.700 drinking at the time of the alleged incident. In her initial conversations with the New Yorker,

00:04:59.540 she was reluctant to characterize Kavanaugh's role in the alleged incident with certainty.

00:05:04.460 After six days of carefully assessing her memories and consulting with her attorney,

00:05:09.460 Ramirez said that she felt confident of her recollections to say that she remembers Kavanaugh,

00:05:13.420 uh, had exposed himself at a drunken dormitory party, party, thrust his penis in her face and

00:05:18.980 caused her to touch it without her consent. As she pushed him away. Ramirez is now calling for the

00:05:23.240 FBI to investigate Kavanaugh's role in the incident. Now, um, if you please, can we go back and hone in

00:05:31.200 on this for just a minute where she says in her initial conversations with the New Yorker, she was

00:05:35.580 reluctant to characterize Kavanaugh's role in the alleged incident with certainty. After six days of

00:05:40.220 carefully assessing her memories and consulting with her attorney, she then decided that Kavanaugh was the

00:05:47.340 guy. So this is a drunken memory from 35 years ago. Up until this week, she wasn't sure if Kavanaugh was

00:05:55.420 involved at all. But after talking to her lawyers for six days and assessing her memories, she decided

00:06:03.060 that he was. Wow. So, so what is this? Is this just like a repressed memory that her lawyers were

00:06:10.280 able to bring to the service? What, what was it? Hypnosis? I mean, how did they get this memory out of

00:06:14.980 her mind? Um, is that what this was now? Nevermind the fact that the whole idea of repressed memories is

00:06:22.040 bogus. Um, but even if, because that's, you know, that's something that I feel like that, that idea of

00:06:30.580 repressed memories is kind of plays a part in this, in, in, in how the public views, uh, the Kavanaugh

00:06:36.820 situation. You know, when you hear about a woman who, uh, says this thing happened, but she didn't

00:06:42.820 remember the details until just now. And, and then we think, well, oh yeah, that's like a repressed

00:06:48.540 memory, but we're getting that from TV shows and from movies in Hollywood. In reality, that doesn't

00:06:55.560 actually exist. You're not going to have someone who was traumatized by an event, but then, but

00:07:01.660 it doesn't remember. And then all of a sudden years later, it just pops to their, into their mind,

00:07:06.460 uh, because, because of some jostling, usually from a therapist, but in this case, from a lawyer,

00:07:10.680 it doesn't really work that way. In fact, in, in, in, you know, most of the time, if somebody is

00:07:16.620 traumatized, not only do they not forget it, but they have the opposite problem where they replay it in

00:07:23.920 their mind a hundred times a day for the rest of their life. That that's, that's often how this

00:07:28.200 goes. But in this case, we're told, well, we aren't told that she forgot the entire incident.

00:07:33.300 She remembered it, I guess, but, um, she didn't remember who it was that actually, you know,

00:07:41.820 did this thing until now. So I guess that was a repressed memory. Um, so going back to the article,

00:07:49.600 says Ramirez said that when both she and Kavanaugh were freshmen at Yale, she was invited

00:07:53.900 by a friend on the women's soccer team to a dorm room party. She recalled that the party took place

00:07:58.600 in a suite at Lawrence hall in the part of Yale known as the old campus. And that a small group

00:08:03.720 of students decided to play a drinking game together. We were sitting in a court in a circle.

00:08:08.240 She said, people would pick who drank Ramirez was chosen repeatedly. She said, and quickly became

00:08:13.440 inebriated. At one point, she said a male student pointed a gag, a gag plastic penis in her direction.

00:08:19.320 Later, she said she was on the floor, foggy and slurring her words as that male student and another

00:08:25.900 stood by. Um, a third male student then exposed himself to her quote. I remember a penis being in

00:08:32.700 front of my face. She said, um, I knew that's not what I wanted. Even in the, even in that state of

00:08:38.140 mind, she recalled remarking, that's not a real penis. And the other students laughed at her confusion

00:08:43.900 and, uh, and, uh, taunting her one, encouraging her to kiss it quote unquote, kiss it. She said

00:08:50.280 that she pushed the person away, um, touching it in the process. Ramirez who was raised a devout

00:08:56.380 Catholic in Connecticut said that she was shaken quote. I was, I wasn't going to touch a penis until

00:09:01.300 I was married. She said, I was embarrassed and ashamed and humiliated. She remembers Kavanaugh

00:09:07.160 standing to her right and laughing, pulling up his pants. Brett was laughing. She said, I can

00:09:12.480 still see his face. Um, she recalled another male student shouting about the incident. Somebody

00:09:17.820 yelled down the hall, Brett Kavanaugh just put his penis in Debbie's face. She said, quote,

00:09:22.540 it was his full name. I don't think it was just Brett. And I remember hearing and being mortified

00:09:28.040 that this was out there. Okay. Um, and it says, and yet after several days of considering the matter

00:09:36.380 carefully, she said, I'm confident about the pants coming up and I'm confident about Brett being

00:09:40.700 there. Okay. A few things to unpack here. First of all, the woman said she was lying on the floor

00:09:49.440 drunk. So she's completely wasted, um, foggy and slurring her words. The article says, but notice

00:09:59.320 the passive way that this is worded. She quickly became inebriated is what it said as if it was

00:10:04.820 something that just happened, you know, outside of her control, not a decision that she made

00:10:08.580 anyway. Um, second, she calls on her devout Catholic faith, you know, as, as part of this

00:10:16.900 story yet, she also admits that she was lying on the floor drunk at a party with a bunch of college

00:10:20.580 boys. And look, people get drunk at parties in college. I'm not going to call her character in

00:10:26.560 a question for that, but it's just, you, you can't really fall back on the, I was just a good Catholic

00:10:32.740 girl thing. Given the context. I mean, it seems like she added that in as a way to kind of bolster

00:10:39.420 her credibility. Um, but yet given the context, it's just, it's, it's hard to make that case.

00:10:46.700 Third thing. Um, she says she remembers someone shouting, Brett Kavanaugh put his penis in Debbie's

00:10:54.380 face, but then she also has been saying this whole time that she wasn't really sure if Kavanaugh was

00:11:01.180 the one who did this. Now that doesn't really make sense because if she really remembers someone

00:11:06.640 literally shouting, Brett Kavanaugh did this thing, like his full name, then she wouldn't have any doubts

00:11:13.660 that Brett Kavanaugh did this thing. The fact that she does have doubts, even now it seems,

00:11:20.800 would seem to indicate that this part of the story, the part about the person shouting,

00:11:24.380 is must not have really happened because if she 100% remembers that, that somebody shouted,

00:11:30.720 then she should be 100% confident about this whole story, which she isn't.

00:11:35.960 And then fourth, the only thing she seems to be confident about is that, uh, the pants came up

00:11:41.300 and Brett Kavanaugh was there. So in summary, she says, okay, I'm confident that the pants were coming

00:11:47.340 up and Brett Kavanaugh was there. That's not the same thing as saying, I'm confident that Brett

00:11:54.000 Kavanaugh was the one. Um, okay. Now we get really to the crux of the matter here. Uh, going back to

00:12:01.360 the article says the New Yorker has not confirmed with other eyewitnesses that Kavanaugh was present

00:12:06.780 at the party. The magazine content contacted several dozen classmates of Ramirez and Kavanaugh

00:12:13.240 regarding the incident. Many did not respond to interview requests. Others declined to comment or said

00:12:17.800 they did not attend or remember the party. A classmate of Ramirez's who declined to be identified,

00:12:24.160 um, said that another student told him about the incident, either on the night of the party or the

00:12:28.800 next day or two. The classmate said that he is 100% sure that he was told at the time that Kavanaugh was

00:12:33.780 a student who exposed himself to Ramirez. He independently recalled many of the same details

00:12:37.700 offered by Ramirez, including that a male student had encouraged Kavanaugh as he exposed himself.

00:12:42.440 The classmate like Ramirez recalled that the party took place in a common room in the first floor and

00:12:47.520 entryway B of Lawrence Hall during their freshman year. Um, okay. So no eyewitnesses confirmed the

00:12:57.720 story. Some have disputed it, but they did find a corroborating story from an anonymous person,

00:13:06.080 which, which was relayed secondhand. So this is a person doesn't want to be identified, but they say

00:13:11.500 that someone told them that this thing happened. Um, now let's look at this statement from the

00:13:18.100 article. It says in a statement, two of those male classmates who Ramirez alleged were involved

00:13:23.340 in the incident and the wife of a third male student who, uh, she said was involved and three

00:13:30.120 other classmates disputed Ramirez's accounts of the event. Um, one of them says, quote, we were,

00:13:38.460 we were the people closest to Brett Kavanaugh during his first year at Yale. He was a roommate to some

00:13:42.600 of us and we spent a great deal of time with him. Uh, some of us were also friends with Debbie

00:13:46.860 Ramirez during and after her time at Yale. We could say with confidence that if the incident Debbie

00:13:51.860 alleges ever occurred, we would have seen or heard about it. And we did not. The behavior she describes

00:13:56.820 will be completely out of character for Brett. Um, in addition, some of us knew Debbie, Debbie long

00:14:02.080 after Yale, and she never described this incident until Brett's Supreme court nomination was pending.

00:14:06.100 And then, uh, and then we also hear from a former friend of Debbie Ramirez who was married to the

00:14:15.000 classmate alleged to be involved. And, uh, she says, and she said that, look, I was best friends

00:14:20.420 with, uh, Ramirez during school. And, uh, we shared all these different intimate details of our lives

00:14:25.760 with each other. She never mentioned that she never said anything about this. Okay. So there you go.

00:14:32.340 Um, multiple alleged eyewitnesses contradict her account. A friend of Ramirez contradicts it.

00:14:39.720 So again, we have no evidence, no corroborating accounts, several contradictory accounts

00:14:45.580 and somehow the New Yorker considered this fit to print. I mean, it's, it's remarkable.

00:14:53.220 And of course we, again, ask ourselves, um, even if this was true, which there's no reason to think

00:15:04.220 it was true, but even if this incident, even if this drunken incident did occur, um, between all

00:15:10.100 these drunk people at a, at a college party where Brett Kavanaugh, you know, pulled his pants down.

00:15:15.240 Uh, uh, does that matter now, 35 years later, does it have any bearing on the fact, you know,

00:15:24.560 on whether or not he is capable of being a competent Supreme court justice. And for this story, um, even

00:15:31.220 more than for the other one, I say certainly, uh, no, it, it doesn't really have any bearing true or

00:15:38.260 not. And again, there's no reason to think that it is true, but true or not. I just don't see how this

00:15:44.000 has any impact whatsoever on whether or not he would be a reliable, um, Supreme court justice.

00:15:52.860 And it's also hard, you know, now, now we're told, I guess that this has traumatized her,

00:15:57.780 um, that she's been traumatized for by it for her whole life. But, um, that's kind of hard to

00:16:03.140 believe too. I gotta be honest with you because for one thing, up until this week, she didn't even

00:16:09.480 remember if Brett Kavanaugh was the guy. Again, that is not, that's not, it's not generally how

00:16:14.760 it works. If somebody traumatizes you, does something that traumatizes you, you're going

00:16:20.320 to remember them. Now you may, you may be foggy on some other details, but you're going to remember

00:16:25.800 who did it. Um, and then we also have this last thing from the article that I'll read. Um,

00:16:33.320 she's, uh, Ramirez said that she continued to socialize with one of the male classmates who

00:16:40.480 had egged on Kavanaugh during the party. She invited the classmate to her house for Thanksgiving

00:16:45.080 after he told her that he had nowhere to go. She also attended his wedding years later as a

00:16:50.120 guest, guest of his wife and said that she posed for photographs with Kavanaugh smiling. Um,

00:16:57.120 okay, but so, so, so, so again, but the, so she was supposedly traumatized by this event,

00:17:07.040 yet she was still friends with at least one of the guys that was involved for years after the fact.

00:17:13.180 Never said anything to about, you know, never mentioned this story to anybody was friends

00:17:17.500 with the, with this guy. And now all of a sudden it's changed. The article also says that Ramirez said

00:17:25.460 that she remained silent about the matter and did not fully confront her memories about it for years

00:17:30.020 because she blamed herself for drinking too much. Um, she says, even if I did drink too much,

00:17:37.160 any person observing it, would they want their daughter, their granddaughter with a penis in

00:17:41.600 their face while they're drinking that much? She said, I can say that at 53, but when I was 19 or 20,

00:17:47.560 I was vulnerable. I didn't know any better. Reflecting on the incident now, she says she considers

00:17:53.800 Kavanaugh's male classmates culpable. They're accountable for not stopping this. She said,

00:17:57.920 however, what Brett did is the worst. Uh, she added, what does it mean that this person has a role in

00:18:04.120 defining women's rights in our future? Okay. So two, two, two last things. First of all,

00:18:08.420 she gives away her political motivations with that last line. Yeah. You know, uh, he's going to have a

00:18:14.200 role in defining women's rights. So obviously this is a pro-abortion person. She's a registered Democrat.

00:18:18.080 So this is, this is, she, she at least is partially politically motivated, um, which could explain

00:18:25.200 how, you know, that, that, that could have factored into this son epiphany that she's had this past

00:18:31.740 week about the fact that Brett Kavanaugh was, uh, was involved in, in her mind, she thinks that Brett

00:18:38.460 Kavanaugh is a threat to her, to her very human rights as a woman, which he's not, but that's what she

00:18:45.500 thinks. So it seems like she would have a very, uh, powerful subconscious motivation, at least

00:18:54.460 subconscious motivation to put Brett Kavanaugh's face onto this situation, even if he wasn't involved.

00:19:04.120 But the second thing is, you know, and this doesn't really matter, but you see how she takes

00:19:08.540 absolutely no responsibility for the fact that she got wasted at the party. She says, I didn't know any

00:19:13.480 better. Well, okay. Well, can Brett Kavanaugh use that excuse? I mean, it, it, look, the whole thing

00:19:25.160 is, uh, is, is kind of a joke at this point. What Republicans need to do is they just need to confirm

00:19:30.920 Brett Kavanaugh and be done with this. They need to grow a spine and say, you know what? We're done.

00:19:37.280 We're, we're, we're not doing this anymore. We are not going to just sit here and wait while the

00:19:44.420 Democrats go around trying to dig up whatever skeletons or imagined skeletons they can find

00:19:50.780 so that they can parade them in front of the media. We're not, we're not going to sit around waiting

00:19:54.640 for them to do that. We're not going to give them another week or two weeks to, to, to go and see if

00:20:00.260 they can find even more accusers and even more accusations from a drunken parties 35 years ago.

00:20:05.740 That's what the Republicans should say. We're not going to do that. We're just going to confirm

00:20:11.960 him. And if you don't like it too bad, that's all. Supreme court is not an elected position.

00:20:21.480 So Brett Kavanaugh doesn't need to be popular. It honestly doesn't matter how people feel about it.

00:20:28.980 That's what the Republicans need to say, but they won't say it because they're cowards.

00:20:35.740 So, um, this spectacle will only continue until Brett Kavanaugh or until the Republicans

00:20:42.860 develop enough of a spine to finally put an end to it, which I don't know if that's going to happen.

00:20:50.200 We'll leave it there. Thanks for watching everybody. Thanks for listening. Godspeed.

00:20:53.140 Thank you.

The Matt Walsh Show - September 24, 2018

Ep. 109 - Kavanaugh Accusations Flimsy, Michael Avenatti and Media Malpractice

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