Kavanaugh Book Author: Things ‘Likely Happened’ During Youth, ‘Better Man Over Last 36 Years’

Robin Pogrebin said on Tuesday that “bitter partisanship” has caused the reaction to her book that includes a now-discredited claim of Brett Kavanaugh’s alleged sexual misconduct while a student at Yale and that bad things “likely happened” when the now-Supreme Court Justice was young but that he has been “a better man over the last 36 years.”

Pogrebin was interviewed on WMAL radio’s Mornings on the Mall program and was asked why the article on the book she wrote with fellow Times reporter Kate Kelly, “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh, An Investigation,” left out the fact that the so-called victim did not recall the alleged misconduct.

Calling it an “inadvertent error,” Robin Pogrebin claims that editors at the Times decided to take out the victim’s name to protect her and in doing so also took out the part of the book that states the victim did not remember the incident.

The Times‘ reported Saturday, in an article that appeared in Sunday’s print edition about the book:

We also uncovered a previously unreported story about Mr. Kavanaugh in his freshman year that echoes Ms. [Deborah] Ramirez’s allegation. A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student. Mr. Stier, who runs a nonprofit organization in Washington, notified senators and the F.B.I. about this account, but the F.B.I. did not investigate and Mr. Stier has declined to discuss it publicly. (We corroborated the story with two officials who have communicated with Mr. Stier.)

Pogrebin said that while Stier’s account was not previously reported, it was known about by both U.S. Senators and the F.B.I.

“To not include an account like that would have been irresponsible,” Pogrebin told WMAL. “Not to mention the fact that it’s been out there since the hearings.”

Pogrebin also said that the part of the book about Kavanaugh’s alleged sexual misconduct is “two paragraphs in a, you know, almost 300-page book.”

“We did not make a lot of this,” Pogrebin said. “The world is making a lot of this.”

She said those two paragraphs did not represent the “thrust” of the book and went on to say sources the authors spoke to about Kavanaugh described him as “an upstanding citizen,” and “a church-going family man.”

“He’s also been widely admired on both sides of the aisle professionally and personally and he has a much more nuanced record on the court — 12 years on the circuit court, which I think also got lost in this conversation,” Pogrebin said.

But Pogrebin also defended the book as one filled with facts.

“We just put out every fact that we could find that hadn’t been reported previously — this is one of them,” Pogrebin said.

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