Kavanaugh should never have been appointed. Impeachment is our only hope

It seems even more likely than it did before that US supreme court Justice Brett Kavanaugh is indeed a serial sexual assaulter. New revelations about the multiply accused Kavanaugh’s time at Yale that were released this weekend by two New York Times reporters, Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelley, and the reporting corroborates an accusation made by Deborah Ramirez, Kavanaugh’s old undergraduate classmate from Yale. It suggests that Kavanaugh likely lied about the incident under oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and makes it apparent that the FBI investigation that was hastily commissioned to investigate a series of accusations against the then-nominee ignored evidence and turned away many people with information that supported the claims of his accusers.

Before Kavanaugh’s confirmation, Ramirez told the New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow that the judge got drunk and shoved his penis into her face at a dorm party when the two were in college. The accusation from Ramirez drew public attention at the time in part because it fit the same pattern as the incident described by California psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford, who gave a moving testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee during Kavanaugh’s confirmation process in which she claimed that the judge, then very drunk, held her down and attempted to rape her at a party while the two were in high school.

At the time, Ramirez’ account was moving and consistent, but could have been better corroborated. But the new reporting goes significantly further in confirming her account. Pogrebin and Kelley discovered multiple people who said that heard about the incident within days, and even more—at least seven in total—say they knew about the allegation before Kavanaugh was a federal judge. This included Ramirez’ mother, whom Ramirez told of the incident in tears. The reporters also found another classmate at Yale who claims that he saw Kavanaugh on another occasion, at another party, force his penis into the hand of another woman. That account has also been corroborated by other witnesses, although the woman herself says she does not remember it.

In his sneering, entitled, and petulant testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in response to the allegations, Kavanaugh railed against his political enemies, implied that he was the target of a vengeful conspiracy “on behalf of the Clintons,” and asserted that he liked beer. He also denied the Ramirez accusation, saying that if the incident had happened, it would have been “the talk of campus.” “Our reporting suggests that it was,” the reporters write.

All of this information was made available to the FBI, Progrebin and Kelley report, but investigators there did not seem very interested. Ramirez’ lawyers gave the FBI a list of at least 25 people who could provide more evidence to support her story. None of them were interviewed. In her own interview with the FBI, Ramirez said that agents somewhat apologetically told her that they had little leeway to investigate her story. Her former classmate Max Stier, now a successful lawyer, who says he witnessed Kavanaugh attack the other woman, also reached out to the FBI as well as to Senators. His claims were not investigated either.

Taken together, the accounts from Ramirez and Blasey Ford painted a picture of a young Brett Kavanaugh who abused alcohol, felt violently entitled to sexual access to women, and seemed confident that his privilege would insulate him from any consequences for this behavior. Coming on the heels of the Me Too movement, American women rightly felt that the accusations disqualified Kavanaugh from the bench, and that they were no longer willing to tolerate the indignity of being governed by men like him.

That Kavanaugh was confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate despite the accusations confirmed in many women’s minds that the Republican party had a deep disregard, if not an outright contempt, for women’s rights. That Kavanaugh’s ascent to the court will almost certainly mean the erosion of abortion rights, contraception rights, and anti-discrimination protections for women only added injury to insult. The new reporting from Progebin and Kelley confirms that a grave injustice was done to Kavanaugh’s accusers, and to all American women. A man was appointed to the supreme court in spite of multiple credible allegations of sexual assault, and federal agencies declined to pursue any meaningful investigation of those allegations. Women’s safety and dignity were deemed less important than the Republican consolidation of power.

In a just world, this man would never have been appointed to the Court; in this world, he was. If he was a better and more honorable man, Kavanaugh would now resign; as the man he is, he will not. The best American women can hope for now is his impeachment, a proposition which several presidential candidates have endorsed since the revelations were made this weekend.

But the Times’ handling of the new reporting from Progebin and Kelley raises questions about whether the media, as well as Republican lawmakers, are complicit in Kavanaugh’s impunity and the dismissal of the women’s claims.

The Times chose to publish the revelations in the form of an excerpt from Progebin and Kelley’s forthcoming book, The Education of Brett Kavanaugh, instead of as its own reporting. It published the piece on a weekend, when it would have less news impact, and in the Sunday Review section. In print, the article was not on the front page of its section and was not mentioned in the newspaper’s political coverage. Online, despite its considerable reporting and bombshell political implications, the piece was labeled as “opinion.” It is likely that many readers would have missed these revelations about one of the most powerful men in the country if the Times had not linked to the article in an eye-poppingly inappropriate and insensitive tweet. “Having a penis thrust in your face at a drunken dorm party may seem like harmless fun,” the tweet, sent out from the Times Opinion account on Saturday, began. No, it does not, women countered.

The publication of this new information was dramatically and tellingly botched. It is unclear what editorial priorities went into the series of bad decisions surrounding the excerpt, but to many feminists, the paper’s apparent desire to downplay the reporting reminded them of its coverage of E Jean Carroll, the advice columnist who this summer accused Donald Trump of raping her in the early 90s. Back then, the Times made the strange decision to place its coverage of a credible rape allegation against a sitting president not on the front page, but in the Books section.

Perhaps that incident was a sign of how far standards of behavior have sunk, when it comes to Donald Trump; after the man won the presidency despite bragging about sexual assault and being multiply accused of it, there may have been a reasonable argument to make that an accusation that he did, indeed, allegedly commit sexual assault was not especially revelatory news. But it also seems possible that the Times is less vigorously promoting stories that give credence to sexual assault allegations against the powerful than they would other news developments that have such staggering political implications. The decision making process at the Times is opaque, and the paper no longer has a public editor; we will likely never know why editors there mishandled this story so badly. But it’s possible that they, like the Republican Senators and the FBI, simply do not find this new information very interesting. At least, they do not find it worthy of the front page.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist