How to humiliate a woman: the ugly lesson of Brett Kavanaugh's yearbook

Alongside the accolades “Keg City club” (“100 kegs or bust”) and “Beach Week Ralph club – biggest contributor” in Brett Kavanaugh’s 1983 yearbook entry, there lurks a more obscure boast: “Renate alumnus”. As accusations of sexual assault mount against Donald Trump’s supreme-court pick, the latest strike against his character has been revealed by the New York Times, in the form of a 35-year-old joke. “Renate alumnus” refers to Renate Dolphin, a female classmate of Kavanaugh’s. She was immortalised in the Georgetown preparatory school yearbook through 14 mentions of “Renate alumnus” by several men – including Kavanaugh – the pernicious insinuation being a shared intimate history with her.

“I learned about these yearbook pages only a few days ago,” Dolphin said. “I don’t know what ‘Renate alumnus’ actually means. I can’t begin to comprehend what goes through the minds of 17-year-old boys who write such things, but the insinuation is horrible, hurtful and simply untrue.” A few weeks ago, Dolphin was one of the signatories to the open letter from 65 women attesting that Kavanaugh “always treated women with decency and respect” in his schooldays.

Kavanaugh and his friends presumably included this jibe with the expectation that they could snigger over it in years to come. Four of the men have claimed it was a reference to their dating or going to dances with Dolphin, while Kavanaugh’s lawyer asserted that it referred to one “one high-school event together and nothing else”.

I remember, age 11, being told a boy was waiting to ask me a question in our school’s sports shed. I was curious, perhaps a little hopeful. But the game immediately became obvious: he had been dared to ask me on a date. I still remember the mocking laughter when he stammered out the question, knowing the joke was my undesirability. In Dolphin’s case, the punchline just took longer to come.

“I think all of us have probably done things we look back on in high school and regret or cringe a bit,” Kavanaugh told Fox News on Monday. Can we judge men by what they did as boys? At least in this respect, Kavanaugh’s response was perfectly honest, if also damning. It prompts the question, how can a man be trusted with a crucial vote over 166 million women’s rights to bodily autonomy, when he failed to stand up for just one?