At a recent resentencing hearing, disgraced lawyer Michael Avenatti did his best to try and sound contrite. He named the people he has scammed, extorted, and stolen from, including makeup celebrity Michelle Phan and a quadriplegic man.

However, there was one name missing in Avenatti’s mea culpa: Brett Kavanaugh. 

The media and their partners in the Democratic National Committee would like to forget it, but in 2018 Michael Avenatti tried to destroy Brett Kavanaugh, who was then a nominee for the Supreme Court. He did so through extortion, witness tampering, and feeding lies to the media.

So why no apology for Justice Kavanaugh? Probably because Avenatti admitting his crimes in this incident would trigger yet another re-examination of the media’s role in the attack—and the press doesn’t want to go there. (Jake Tapper may get around to it by the time we colonize Mars, but that’s just speculation.)

It’s no surprise the media doesn’t want to admit their complicity in criminal activity. Among other things, it would be very inconvenient. Liberals love the trope of dusting off Senator Joe McCarthy, who was alive some 70 years ago and has been reanimated in their imaginations by George Clooney this year on Broadway. They would prefer to forget Michael Avenatti.

Before being sentenced to 11 years—a resentencing after his initial sentence of 14 years was overturned—Avenatti submitted a letter to Judge James V. Selna, who presided over his case in which he appears to be contrite about the harm he caused to some of his victims. “Not a day goes by that I do not think of the harm I caused Mr. Johnson, Ms. Gardner, Mr. Barela, and Ms. Phan,” Avenatti wrote. “They each deserved far better and I deeply regret the pain I caused. I violated the law and equally, if not more importantly, their trust. I will not offer any excuses for my conduct, because there are none. Full stop.”

Avenatti went on:

I have focused my efforts over the last 40 months in prison on being accountable, exercising humility, and becoming a better father, a better man, and a better human being. I have made a concentrated effort at rediscovering what drove me to become a lawyer to begin with 40 years ago—an innate desire to help others at a difficult time in their lives.

Avenatti claimed that he attends Twelve Step meetings, does suicide watch for other inmates, and his “greatest moments of happiness and satisfaction while I have been in prison have centered not on myself, but helping others succeed.” He concluded that “In a strange way, and after having years to reflect on my life and conduct, I feel that perhaps I needed to be sent to prison and experience my downfall to be reminded of the things that really matter in life. And that money isn’t one of them.”

The true test of Avenatti’s contrition will be if he is willing to apologize to Kavanaugh and come clean about the extortion that took place in 2018, a plot of Avenatti’s in which I was also a mark.

On Sept. 24, 2018—my birthday—I got a call from California number. The caller said, “You like f-ing with people, I like f-ing with people too” and advised me to call him back to “work something out.”

Avenatti and others had spent all summer doing opposition research on me and Brett, who had been a high school friend of mine. A woman named Christine Blasey Ford accused Brett of sexual assault at a party she said happened sometime around 1982 and claimed I witnessed it. Avenatti and the DNC had discovered old writings of mine and human sources who dished dirt on some of the wild things I did in reckless youth. They also found a friend of Blasey Ford’s, a woman name Leland Keyser, who they threatened.

A text chain at the time between some people boosting Blasey Ford complained that Keyser denying Blasey Ford’s claim was “a major stumbling block.” Calling a supposed witness who denies your story a “major stumbling block” is the language of extortion.

Two of the reporters covering the Kavanaugh story at the time were Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer from The New Yorker. I got a phone call from Farrow in mid-September 2018, just after the news broke that Senator Dianne Feinstein had received a letter regarding Brett. Farrow informed me that I was mentioned in the letter and that the charge had to do with “sexual misconduct in the 1980s.”

I still find myself incredulous at the vagueness of the charge. I was being asked about something that had happened “in the 1980s”—as in, the entire decade. As John McCormick wrote at the time in The Weekly Standard:

Judge says he first learned he was named in the letter during an interview with the New Yorker….The Kavanaugh classmate told TWS that the New Yorker did not provide him the name of the woman alleging wrongdoing, a specific date of the alleged incident, or the location where the incident is alleged to have occurred.

Blogger Allahpundit put it this way:

Judge apparently found out he was named in the letter when Ronan Farrow called to ask about it. Farrow offered no details about when the incident supposedly happened or where, or even the name of the woman. Judge has been accused of participating in an attempted rape with a would-be Supreme Court justice, in other words, and can’t even get the basic facts of the allegation provided to him. It’s Kafkaesque.

In May 2018 Farrow dined with Michael Avenatti. A week after the Blasey Ford accusation in September, a woman named Julie Swetnick, represented by Avenatti, would accuse me and Brett of being present at 10 high school parties where girls were gang-raped. Swetnick also claimed that she herself had been raped at one of these parties.

After Avenatti’s resentencing, I reached out to Jane Mayer and told her I was doing a story about Avenatti and the media. “The New Yorker was not among the news organizations that published Avenatti’s allegation against Kavanaugh,” Mayer told me. “We were unconvinced of its veracity then, and I remain so today.”

Mayer had no problem, however, publishing a story quoting an old college girlfriend of mine, fabricating a claim that I was once involved in a group sex situation. The former girlfriend said I had talked about this during a conversation where we discussed how we lost our virginity. I don’t think I’ll ever forget being asked by Senate investigators about how I lost my virginity. I had to give them the girl’s name, and I’m guessing she vouched for me.

Mayer was also a prominent pusher of the Russia hoax. In the March 12, 2018 edition of The New Yorker, Mayer published an exclusive: “Christopher Steele, the Man Behind The Trump Dossier.” It was a profile of the infamous former British spy behind the phony dossier claiming Trump had been involved with Russian prostitutes and that the Kremlin was using that information to blackmail the president. In the years that followed, the dossier story collapsed, with major media outlets like The Washington Post retracting large chunks of their coverage and adding editor’s notes to many others. Journalist Matt Taibbi effectively challenged Mayer’s reporting on it. So did National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke.

Ronan Farrow has also been called to task for his reporting. His New Yorker coverage was questioned in 2020 by Ben Smith, a media reporter at the New York Times. According to Smith, “if you scratch at Mr. Farrow’s reporting in the New Yorker and in his 2019 best seller, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators, you start to see some shakiness at its foundation.” Farrow, noted Smith,

delivers narratives that are irresistibly cinematic—with unmistakable heroes and villains—and often omits the complicating facts and inconvenient details that may make them less dramatic. At times, he does not always follow the typical journalistic imperatives of corroboration and rigorous disclosure, or he suggests conspiracies that are tantalizing but he cannot prove.

Smith offers examples of Farrow not talking to key witnesses in sexual harassment cases, subjectively interpreting events, and ignoring key facts. Smith concludes:

Mr. Farrow, 32, is not a fabulist. His reporting can be misleading but he does not make things up. His work, though, reveals the weakness of a kind of resistance journalism that has thrived in the age of Donald Trump: That if reporters swim ably along with the tides of social media and produce damaging reporting about public figures most disliked by the loudest voices, the old rules of fairness and open-mindedness can seem more like impediments than essential journalistic imperatives.

Michael Avenatti was at the center of a Farrow story involving Michael Cohen, a former personal lawyer to President Trump. In “Missing Files Motivated the Leak of Michael Cohen’s Financial Records,” Farrow suggests something suspicious inside the Treasury Department. An FBI employee had noticed that records about Cohen had vanished from a government database in 2018. Farrow quotes the anonymous public servant as saying he was so concerned about the records’ disappearance that he leaked other financial reports to the media to warn the public about Cohen’s financial activities. Congressional Democrats and the media went crazy—Rachel Maddow called the story “a meteor strike”—and the Treasury Department promised to investigate.

Yet as Ben Smith writes, “two years after publication, little of Mr. Farrow’s article holds up, according to prosecutors and court documents.” The Treasury Department records on Michael Cohen never went missing. That was just the claim by the civil servant, an Internal Revenue Service analyst named John Fry. Fry had leaked the information after seeing a tweet by Michael Avenatti. In May 2018 Avenatti went on Twitter and demanded that the Treasury Department release Cohen’s records. Fry, as Smith described him, was “a longtime I.R.S. employee based in San Francisco, one of the legions of followers of Mr. Avenatti’s Twitter account, and had frequently liked his posts.”

Then this:

Hours after Mr. Avenatti’s tweet that day, Mr. Fry started searching for the documents on the government database, downloaded them, then immediately contacted Mr. Avenatti and later sent him Mr. Cohen’s confidential records, according to court documents. Mr. Fry ended up pleading guilty to a federal charge of unauthorized disclosure of confidential reports this January.

When asked about this and other problems with Farrow’s reporting, Smith got double-talk. “The best reporting tries to capture the most attainable version of the truth, with clarity and humility about what we don’t know,” Smith wrote. “Instead, Mr. Farrow told us what we wanted to believe about the way power works, and now, it seems, he and his publicity team are not even pretending to know if it’s true.”

As is always the case with the media, the truth arrives months after they report the salacious lies. In her book 2022 book Dissent: The Radicalization of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Court, reporter Jackie Calmes from the Los Angeles Times tried to verify Avenatti and Swetnick’s claims. Swetnick had claimed that she was raped and had reported that crime to the police. Towards the end of Dissent, Calmes reveals that she tried to uncover the police report:

County officials never did search for any Swetnick police filling. The 1982 records had not been digitized, and the county records custodian told me in September 2019 that no one, including Avenatti, would pay the $1,260 charge for looking through the thousand boxes of hundreds of microfiche files for the year. I paid the county to do so, but rescinded the work order when Swetnick, in a brief interview before the search began, retracted her claim that she was assaulted in 1982. She’d specified that year in both her sworn statement and her NBC appearance, but a year later told me it could have been 1980 or 1981.

How strange—neither the media nor their hero Michael Avenatti would pay a grand to find the police report. It’s almost like they were working together. Maybe as he sits in jail for the next decade Avenatti can think about coming clean on that lie, too.