One Last Climactic Scene: Me vs Matt Damon 

The long saga of my name being dragged through the mud in the attempted takedown of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh ends where it began. Like the perfect wrap-up to a movie.

I recently did a piece for Chronicles that went viral and led to a story on Fox News. A New York Times reporter told me that he regretted his stories about me and Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. David Enrich of the Times wrote to me that he has “learned some lessons and would probably do things differently next time.”

It was the resolution I have been waiting six years to see come to fruition—despite many well-meaning friends, family, and other prominent conservatives telling me to move on. Enrich’s admission to me wasn’t a full confession, but it was close enough. Enrich knows what his paper did, how recklessly they printed rumors, gossip, falsehoods, and flimsily sourced material with no other intent ruin Brett’s chances of being confirmed to the Court, even if it destroyed my life and Brett’s.

Now it’s time to move on. Before I can finally do that, however, there is one more person I feel compelled to call out. His name is Matt Damon.

On Sept. 29, 2018, I was sitting in a motel room contemplating suicide as I watched the famous actor scream my name on Saturday Night Live. A little more than a week earlier, The Washington Post published an article in which Christine Blasey Ford, a psychologist living in California, tried to ruin my life. Ford claimed that Brett Kavanaugh—then recently nominated for the Supreme Court and about to be voted out of committee—had sexually assaulted her sometime in the early 1980s when we were all in high school. Ford claimed that I was in the room where the assault allegedly took place. The whole thing was a set up.

For a short time, I found myself at the center of one of the biggest stories in the world, a part of which was Brett being portrayed on SNL by Matt Damon. At one point Damon, as Kavanaugh, names me: “Mark Judge, who can’t remember huge chunks of his life but is somehow my key witness.” 

Damon’s skit, I have recently learned, will be featured again as part of SNL 50, the upcoming 50th anniversary celebration of Saturday Night Live. The NBC promo copy reads:

In the weeks leading up to February 16’s three-hour 50th anniversary celebration on NBC, the team behind Saturday Night Live has selected one sketch from every single season—50 seasons in 50 days—to reflect the show’s rich legacy across five decades. Presenting the sketch that represents Season 44: ‘Kavanaugh Hearing Cold Open’ starring Matt Damon.

It continues:

Though Supreme Court nominations can be famously divisive across party lines, Kavanaugh’s nomination made headlines due to a woman’s allegations that he’d sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers. Kavanaugh’s vehement denial of the assault claim, and his response to questions about his past alcohol consumption, turned his Supreme Court confirmation hearing into a high-profile event. And so, like so many SNL memorable cold opens that have focused on politics over the show’s 50-year run, ‘Kavanaugh Hearing Cold Open’ found the satire in what was very serious news.

What happened, in fact, is that SNL “found satire” in what was a fake story that involved a lot of criminal activity intended to destroy people’s lives. Indeed, at the height of the insanity, I had good reason to fear that I could be killed. The maelstrom created by such a violent mob often ends tragically. To the left and people like Matt Damon, my life was of no consequence. The only thing that mattered was the utopian world they believed themselves to be attempting to build. 

Damon’s Kavanaugh cold open has aged badly, particularly considering The New York Times reporter coming clean about what was really going on. Yet just as I am encouraging David Enrich to tell the entire story of what “lessons he has learned” and what he “would do differently,” I challenge Matt Damon to have the guts to step up. He should have the courage to move beyond imitating Kavanaugh in a childish skit and do something genuinely daring: Make a film out of my book The Devil’s Triangle.

That book recounts the evil of the 2018 hit on me, Brett, and our friends—including the attempted extortion, witness tampering, honey traps, and death threats. It’s a combination of The Lives of Others and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. (Damon is also encouraged to hit my tip jar.) It’s worth noting that one of Damon’s most famous films is The Bourne Identity. It was directed by Doug Liman who last year tried to trick me into appearing in an anti-Kavanaugh documentary. I was too smart for Liman and when I made it clear the kind of lies he would be promoting and the scumbags he would be defending, he killed the project. 

The Devil’s Triangle is a defense of family, friends, honor, and integrity. Those four things are also the themes at the center of the book Things Worth Dying For: Thoughts on a Life Worth Living by Charles Chaput. The book asks readers to face what their deaths will mean and how it will highlight the lives they have lived. Chaput has served as Archbishop of Philadelphia, Archbishop of Denver and Bishop of Rapid City. He is now retired.

“Family, friends, honor and integrity,” Chaput writes, “these are the natural loves. Throughout history, men and women have been willing to die for these loves.” These loves are often challenged by people who want human love directed not to family, friends, and honor, but to the all-controlling state. As Chaput puts it:

We live in a time of vindictive political discourse on matters ranging from sex to the meaning of our national history. Our politics often seems gripped with amnesia about the price of human suffering extracted by the bitter social experiments and poisonous Big Ideas of the last century—always in the name of progress and equality.

Chaput cites the work of Russian literary giant Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose books “are filled with people who strive to live honorably in the toxic work of Soviet communism.” Although the evil of the Soviet Union might seem to be in history’s rear-view mirror, Chaput warns that “wickedness, like a virus, has a genius for mutating into new and appalling forms, and Solzhenitsyn’s themes are still instructive. Evil is real, even when it is masked by soothing words and excellent marketing. Thus, it’s always vital to honor convictions. And doing so usually has a cost.”

The archbishop also makes an important point about prudence. No one, including Christians, should fetishize martyrdom. Chaput gives the example of St. Polycarp, an early Christian who “withdrew from his city to avoid the civic leaders who required Christians to offer sacrifice to pagan gods.” 

During the political madness of 2018, I left Washington to go to the beach for a few days. Naturally, a reporter followed me down there, asking all sorts of questions that were bizarre, paranoid, and absurd. I was not fleeing the evil of Washington. I just wanted to take a breath before the final battle was joined.

“Cowardice is very good at hiding behind prudence,” Chaput writes. “Too often we twist ourselves to suit what we think is approved behavior or thought. We muffle our thoughts to avoid being the targets of contempt. Over time, a legitimate exercise in prudence can degrade into a habit that soils the soul.” Like the priests in The Exorcist, however, sooner or later you must walk into that room.

Once inside and face-to-face with evil, it’s important to understand the spiritual nature of the battle in front of you. The demons will try and shame you into lying to avoid pain—or even committing suicide, as Fr. Damien Karras in The Exorcist does at the end. In her great essay “Shame Storm,” Helen Andrews explores how many of those victimized by liberal rage mobs come to end their own lives:

It happens more often than you would think. At least half a dozen cases mentioned in Laws of Image: Privacy and Publicity in America, Samantha Barbas’s 2015 history of shame and libel, end with suicides. Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed describes an English chef, living in France, who killed himself after his wife-swapping hobby was revealed by the News of the World. It also tells of a rural Welsh preacher who found himself the subject of a photo spread in the same publication for hosting an orgy in his caravan—after which he, too, killed himself. Most victims of public shaming aren’t nationally famous editors like Ian Buruma. They are ordinary folks like “ID Adam,” who lost his job at a box assembly company in Winston-Salem after reports that he racially profiled a black woman at a community pool. It turned out that he, as the pool chair on duty, had asked to see her ID, because, when signing in, she had given an address on a street in the neighborhood where no houses had yet been built. It took him days to get his side of the story into the papers, and it didn’t make him any less fired.

Andrews adds this:

The idea that online shaming is a form of debate—or in any way oriented toward finding the truth—is a delusion. Dialogue is not the point. The day Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the New Yorker—not Gawker, but the New Yorker—ran thirty-two Kavanaugh headlines in twenty-four hours, many of them on the subject of the nominee’s supposed whininess…. The man had been accused of being a brutal rapist, and the most prestigious magazine in America ridiculed him for responding to the allegation as any innocent man would have. No, dialogue is not the point.

Family. Friends. Honor. Integrity. When your time comes, you might be remembered well if you defend these loves to the end. It’s a part of the 2018 war that would make a great movie. Sadly, Matt Damon would never have the balls to do it. 

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