The message was surprising. David Enrich, an investigative reporter for The New York Times, was responding to a question I had sent him about his newspaper’s 2018 coverage of the Brett Kavanaugh nomination. The Times had disgraced itself with its abysmal “reporting” on Kavanaugh.

Enrich responded in a way that surprised me: “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my role in the Kavanaugh coverage, and I would be happy to talk to you about it at some point. For now, I will just say that I have learned some lessons and would probably do certain things differently next time.”

Wait … what? Journalists never admit when they’re wrong. About anything. Ever. Yet the substance and tone of his message suggested that of a contrite person who might believe he made mistakes. In my experience, this was an extraordinary statement coming from a reporter at the country’s leading newspaper.

Naturally, I asked Enrich to elaborate: What were the lessons learned? What would he do differently? “This is a subject for a longer conversation that I’m not going to have over the holidays,” he wrote. “Sorry.”

Then he added this: “I can’t imagine what it was like for you to go thru that.”

Wow. A New York Times reporter who had gone after Brett Kavanagh, and me, was sounding apologetic. He was recognizing that he had done some things poorly and had put me and Kavanaugh through hell.

Enrich has a new book coming out: Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful which, purportedly, is about defending the integrity of journalism against those who are demanding more accountability from journalists. In reality, his book is about venerating New York Times vs Sullivan, the 1964 Supreme Court decision that held public figures could not sue media companies for libel unless they could prove that a “statement was made with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard of whether it was true or false.” The book was the reason for me contacting him. I wanted to review Murder the Truth, but also to question him about his role in the Kavanaugh hit.

In the past six years I have written several articles about the media hit put out on me and my high school friend Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. I wrote about the extortion, witness tampering, honey traps, and death threats the left used to try and destroy Kavanaugh. My 2022 book The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi details what I discovered about the organized campaign against both me and Kavanaugh. My research uncovered particularly damning things about Christine Blasey Ford, a woman who had accused Brett of sexually assaulting her in 1982 at a high school party. Ford claimed that I was in the room when the assault took place. Some people have told me to let it go already. Yet as the son of a great journalist I was frankly appalled by the way these national reporters tossed professionalism aside and went all in on a partisan witch hunt.

Even now I was hoping that one of these journalists would eventually come clean, especially now that elite media outlets like the Post and The Los Angeles Times seem to be trying to recover their reputations for integrity and “balance” in the wake of Donald Trump’s reelection.

Was Enrich showing me that he was that journalist? Possibly.

Enrich seemed to be having second thoughts about his role in the Kavanaugh feeding frenzy—especially with a new book coming out. He seemed to feel that his integrity was in question and needed repair. Perhaps that’s why he tried to minimize his role in the affair by stating, “I would quibble with the statement that I covered a lot of the Kavanaugh nomination. I believe I co-wrote two articles.”

That’s true, but the two articles he did write, or to be exact co-wrote, were quite lengthy and caused a terrible amount of damage and distress to my family and friends. “I can’t imagine what it was like for you to go through that,” he said. This expression of sympathy was remarkable coming from the person who had caused it, and (speaking as a former Catholic schoolboy) it made me want to give him a chance to atone for his sins, should he be inclined to confess them.

The articles, published in September of 2018 shortly after Blasey Ford made public her allegations, zeroed in on our high school yearbook, our friends, and even The Unknown Hoya, an underground newspaper I and a couple of my friends put out in the early 1980s. One of these articles was incredibly damaging and blew apart decades-long friendships.

Like the rest of the media, Enrich had been sold a lie peddled by opposition researchers—one of whom, Michael Avenatti, is a psychopath and is now in jail—that while in high school Brett and I had been involved in gang rapes and drugging girls. It’s the kind of thing that even 20 years ago would never make it into the media for lack of evidence but, because there are no guardrails on the legacy media anymore, the accusations were published in all the major online and print media and aired over television and radio.

In this context it’s also worth noting how I heard about the looming scandal. One night in September 2018 I got a call from Ronan Farrow who was writing for The New Yorker. Farrow told me that I was implicated in a letter alleging that Brett Kavanaugh had been involved in “sexual misconduct.” He could not tell me who the accuser was, where the alleged conduct had taken place, or even the time—just “sometime in the 1980s.”

Farrow’s work was sharply called into question 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, writes 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 itemizes examples of Farrow not talking to key alleged witnesses in sexual harassment cases, subjectively interpreting events that those whom he writes about see quite differently while ignoring key facts. In one case, they related an allegation that an NBC producer had heard a story of sexual assault, but never actually questioned its source. Smith explained: “Mr. Farrow and the fact checker never called the producer. And if they had, that element of the story would have been much more complicated—or would never have appeared in print.”

In hunting for evidence that Brett and I were plausibly guilty of sexual misconduct, Enrich and his colleague Kate Kelly combed through every scrap of material that involved us going back to the 1980s. One of these supposed pieces of evidence was The Cupola, our yearbook at Georgetown Prep. Enrich and Kelly pored over the book and found some ribald jokes involving a girl with whom we were friends and some of us had dated. It was teenage nonsense, offensive and regrettable. The matter was raised at Brett’s confirmation hearing, where he explained, we were joking in an admittedly ambiguous way with someone we all loved who was a part of our crew. Through their biased and tone-deaf reporting, Enrich and Kelly upended this person’s life and destroyed these friendships, based on a lie peddled by a now-disgraced source about gang rapes and drugging girls which they and other journalists had eagerly embraced.

Kate Kelly’s book about Kavanaugh bombed, and her “reporting” was slagged, even by some liberals. I will always remember her as the bottom-feeding reporter who appeared unannounced and forced her way into the home of an 85-year-old neighbor of mine to ask her about parties I may have attended in high school. The Washington Post wasn’t much better, leaving out exculpatory witnesses and doing profiles of people who talked trash about me, Brett, and our friends without ever having met any of us.

Given all of this, one can understand why Enrich might be having second thoughts about his role in it—why he has “learned some lessons and would probably do things differently next time.” Yet it’s not clear if he can draw the line between his abominable and evil behavior in 2018 and why the public is more and more sympathetic with journalists getting sued.

In his other co-written story about us, Enrich obtained a 1983 letter in which Brett outlined our upcoming Beach Week trip:

The beachfront property was rented, the guests were invited and an ever-organized Brett M. Kavanaugh had some advice for the seven Georgetown Preparatory School classmates who would be joining him for the weeklong escapade.

In a 1983 letter, a copy of which was reviewed by The New York Times, the young Judge Kavanaugh warned his friends of the danger of eviction from an Ocean City, Md., condo. In a neatly written postscript, he added: Whoever arrived first at the condo should “warn the neighbors that we’re loud, obnoxious drunks with prolific pukers among us. Advise them to go about 30 miles.”

The point of printing such stories was to drag me into the nomination process and use my wild and youthful escapades (which I had candidly described in a couple of memoirs) to smear Brett. Thus, sentences like this: “Judge Kavanaugh—a standout student, captain of the basketball team and a master of the quip, according to one teacher—was especially close to Mr. Judge, a fixture of the school’s party scene. Dr. Blasey said that Mr. Judge was in the room and jumped onto the bed during the alleged 1982 assault.”

While Enrich made a big deal about how his dogged reporting led to him finding this letter of Brett’s, the truth is much more pedestrian: It was given to him by two disgruntled losers from our class at Georgetown Prep. The “research” required Enrich going outside to his mailbox and opening the envelope. But then, the entire Blasey Ford hit was a premeditated and orchestrated oppo job. It was criminal, including extortion and witness tampering. My book, The Devil’s Triangle reveals all of that, and the FBI figured it out, which is why their investigation ended so abruptly.

It’s also why in the years since 2018, despite all I’ve said in my articles, my book, and appearance in a documentary on Fox News, neither David Enrich, The New York Times, or anyone else in the establishment media have acknowledged the damning evidence I present of their role in a partisan hit job.

In his forthcoming book, Enrich makes the bold claim that in the Trump era there is unprecedented pressure to censor and intimidate the press:

Beginning in 2016 and continuing through 2024-15 [Trump] relentlessly demonized the media as “evil,” “criminals,” and “the enemy of the people,” applauding violence, threatening to revoke TV networks’ licenses, and floating the idea of jailing reporters. There is a long history, of course, of politicians attacking the news media. What set this apart was not just Trump’s rhetoric but also his success. He convinced broad swaths of the public that journalism itself was illegitimate, that its articles, fact checks, and exposés were not to be trusted—a belief that was enhanced at times by some journalists shirking their roles as open-minded seekers of truth and instead donning the robes of ideologues.

Murder the Truth could have been a very different and better book had Enrich focused more on the last tantalizing comment about journalists abandoning fairness to don “the robes of ideologues.” But he doesn’t seem willing to acknowledge or explore just how reckless and partisan the media has become in the last several decades, such that charges of bias and “fake news” are believable to millions of Americans. Enrich is disturbed that the current Supreme Court has shown signs that it may be in favor of revisiting Sullivan, and he laments the fact the public no longer blindly embraces that standard. 

The justices in that case also held that officials could not, as a matter of constitutional law, bring libel suits based on criticism of government activities in general. As Enrich puts it, “the Court concluded that journalists and others shouldn’t be held liable when they accidentally got facts wrong about people in the public eye.” The theory was that a “vigorous, probing press was an essential safeguard of democracy, a key to holding the government and other institutions in check. If a public figure could seek debilitating damages every time a news organization made a mistake, the media would either start to censor itself or be sued into oblivion.”

There has also been an “emergence of a clique of high-powered lawyers who, motivated by a mixture of profits and politics, specialized in attacking journalists and others on behalf of Russian oligarchs, opioid-pushing executives, corrupt politicians, scandal-plagued celebrities, and many others who were the subjects of unfavorable media coverage.”

To which many Americans say: Good. The media now routinely runs with false stories (Russiagate), covers up inconvenient facts (the Hunter Biden laptops), and maligns people who are both public figures and private individuals. Lies and errors are rampant, and they never get corrected. We are a long way from 1964 or even Watergate, when Woodward and Bernstein supposedly agonized for weeks over a small mistake they once made in their reporting. This is why Sarah Palin’s lawsuit against The New York Times is moving forward, as is a lawsuit against CNN’s Jake Tapper. It’s why ABC and George Stephanopoulos just had to pay Trump $15 million for falsely claiming that Trump had raped E. Jean Carroll.

It also might be why David Enrich is having an attack of conscience even as he prepares to do battle with the right as a defender of journalistic integrity. I wish him luck pulling it off. But it would be more convincing if he would first come clean about what he did to Brett, to me, and to our friends.