(JTA) — A third woman has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct as a high schooler.
On Wednesday, lawyer Michael Avenatti posted testimony by a woman who said she witnessed Kavanaugh drinking heavily at parties and engaging in “abusive and physically aggressive behavior toward girls” as a student at Georgetown Preparatory School in the 1980s.
Among other things, Swetnick said that Kavanaugh had fondled and grabbed girls, attempted to remove their clothing and made “crude sexual comments” at house parties in the Maryland suburb near Washington, D.C., where they attended school. She also said she “became aware of efforts” by Kavanaugh, his friend Mark Judge, now an author and journalist, and others “to cause girls to become inebriated and disoriented so they could then be ‘gang raped.'”
Swetnick said she was raped at one of the house parties where Kavanaugh and Judge were present.
Avenatti told the Forward that his client is Jewish. Swetnick is the niece of Helene Moglen, a professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has written about gender and sexual harassment in the academy, the Forward reported. Swetnick, an information technology specialist, is the daughter of the late Elaine Moglen Swetnick, who worked for the Atomic Energy Commission, and Martin Swetnik, a retired physicist, the Forward reported.
Brett Kavanaugh speaking after being nominated by President Donald Trump to the Supreme Court in the East Room of the White House, July 9, 2018. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
Swetnick’s allegations come on the heels of claims by two other women that Kavanaugh had engaged in sexual misconduct in high school and later as an undergraduate at Yale University.
Kavanaugh, who was nominated by President Donald Trump, has denied the allegations. On Wednesday, in a White House statement, he called Swetnick’s claims “ridiculous and from the Twilight Zone” and said he did not know her.
On Twitter, Trump called Avenatti — whose most famous client, adult film actress Stormy Daniels, is suing the president over an alleged sexual encounter in 2006 — “a third rate lawyer who is good at making false accusations.”
Kavanaugh and another accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, are expected to testify Thursday at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing addressing Ford’s allegations that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a house party in 1982.
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