Watching my friend Mark Judge tell Martha McCallum what happened between Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford was a surreal experience. The answer, of course, was nothing. Ford has never offered the slightest shred of evidence that the two people ever met, much less that he tried to rape her, while Judge sat by and laughed. (Kavanaugh, by contrast, produced his teenage datebook showing that such a meeting was almost impossible.)

Nor could Ford settle on the year the event supposedly happened. Nor could she offer any witnesses, apart from a close friend, Leland Keyser, who then denied Ford’s entire story—and was mobbed by Ford’s political allies for her trouble. When Keyser refused to corroborate Ford’s fantasy, she was dismissed before the U.S. Senate by her “good friend” Ford as being crippled by an unspecified “health” issue for which she was getting help. Ford’s insinuation was that she was mentally incompetent or a “druggie,” making Keyser the third person Ford was willing to defame and perjure herself over in the effort to keep the Court free of conservatives.  

Of course, Ford has only been willing to say these things about Judge and Keyser as she sat behind the libel shield of congressional immunity. She won’t repeat these accusations outside that magic bubble. It’s worth asking why. Why doesn’t some high-profile journalist ask Ford about that? Maybe demand that Ford repeat her claims about Judge in a public forum, where they could be actionable?

Judge told the Fox Nation host the plain, unvarnished truth: He never witnessed or took part in any encounter between Kavanaugh and Ford. He never saw Kavanaugh act in the way consistent with the behavior Ford had claimed was his habit.

Judge is a man who has been through the mill. After finally getting a handle on an alcohol addiction that started in middle school, recovering from leukemia, then scraping by as a freelance writer, Judge became the drive-by victim of professional lawfare conducted by the best “opposition” researchers the left’s money could buy.

As Judge recounts in his beautiful, heartbreaking book, The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi (which I badgered him to write), he was besieged by hack journalists who demanded he answer Kafkaesque questions about “some incident” back “in the 1980s.” Later, he’d be accused on national television, by another totally unreliable witness, of taking part in a string of gang rapes at D.C. teenage parties.

Judge compares the media syndicate he faced to agents of the East German Stasi. Judge got threatening phone calls (likely from disgraced lawyer Michael Avenatti), lost most of his freelance writing work, and saw his name transformed into a byword for sexual abuse … and why?

That question has two parts, each of which Judge has been too much of a gentleman to talk about on television. As he told me after the interview, his father drilled it into him that men don’t pick on women. The first part is, “Why Kavanaugh?” and the second part is “Why Judge?”

The answers to both are easy but require the courage of bluntness—the willingness to decide that certain women, by their actions, have lost the right to expect our chivalry, just as comparable men (see Avenatti) can utterly forfeit our respect.

Why Kavanaugh? Because the abortion industry and its supporters rightly suspected that Kavanaugh might vote to overturn Roe v. Wade—a constitutional decision so fraudulent and frail that Samuel Alito’s demolition of it in Dobbs never gets challenged on the merits. Instead, the left shrieks and wails, sends would-be assassins to Kavanaugh’s home, and threatens to pack the Court. Even pro-abortion zealots have been embarrassed by Roe for decades, and cringed at the sophomoric, stoner logic of Planned Parenthood v. Casey’s “mystery of the universe” defense of killing children for sexual convenience. Alito obliterated the rationales for both decisions, as if they’d never existed.

Ford’s own attorney, Debra Katz, told a gathering of feminists that protecting Roe was part of Ford’s motivation for making her claims:

We were going to have a conservative [justice] … Elections have consequences, but he will always have an asterisk next to his name. When he takes a scalpel to Roe v. Wade, we will know who he is, we know his character, and we know what motivates him, and that is important; it is important that we know, and that is part of what motivated Christine.

That answers the question, “Why Kavanaugh?” But more haunting to me since I know the man is the next question: “Why Judge?”

And that one is even easier. In his naïve, trusting way, Judge thought he could write a book (Wasted) about his struggle with alcohol addiction as a teenager, and the fun he had with some of his friends in high school—among whom Kavanaugh was included. Judge even felt safe in mentioning that his drinking had led to occasional blackouts and memory loss. He thought he still lived in Reagan’s America, bless his heart.

That was all opposition researchers serving the abortion industry needed. By writing Wasted, and admitting to incidents of impaired memory, Judge unwittingly gave the ruthless defenders of Roe precisely what they needed: A “witness” who could not definitively say under oath before the Senate that anything alleged hadn’t happened in his presence. Ford could have claimed that Judge was present when Kavanaugh had sprouted bat wings and flown around the room. After Judge denied that allegation, all Senators Sheldon Whitehouse or Charles Schumer would have to do was slice right into him, “But you cannot say that definitively, Mr. Judge, can you? On page 137 of your own book you admit … .”

That’s why the left was so desperate to have Judge subpoenaed, and so flummoxed when that effort failed. Whatever Judge said, it would have sunk Kavanaugh’s chances. It also would have doomed Kavanaugh’s bid if Judge had committed suicide, which Judge admitted in his book (and here at Chronicles) the media juggernaut made him consider. As Judge wrote at The Stream, in a moving tribute to Jake Gardner (who was driven to suicide after defending himself against a George Floyd rioter):

This is how the Machine now operates, my friends. It killed Gardner and it almost killed me.

Which would have suited Team Blasey Ford just fine, as I told the interviewer with the film crew. “My suicide would have been good news to them.” Had I jumped off the Washington Monument, Brett would not have made it onto the court, and maybe Roe v. Wade would still have been safe.

Perhaps the ugliest part of this story is how the Ford campaign composed her story. Mostly it was a tissue of ambiguities, vague time periods, and unspecified places. But there were just enough details of life in the social circles Judge and Kavanaugh inhabited to give it the ring of verisimilitude to lazy, partisan journalists. Ford might not remember the year when she was raped, but she remembered which convenience store she saw Judge shopping in later. She remembered the Georgetown Prep boys’ love of drinking beer.

Where did such details come from? Judge offers the obvious answer: “My obscure autobiography of high school alcoholism, Wasted, was getting mined as a story bible for a fiction that slandered an old friend of mine, who’d done nothing wrong.”

If ever an author regretted having published a seemingly innocent book, Mark Judge surely must have been him. I hope Chronicles readers treat themselves to his next, vastly more sober Devil’s Triangle, and that they support his ongoing journalism. We can’t make him rich and famous, as the abortion movement has done for Ford. But we do owe Judge a chance to try to rebuild his life.

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