Is it time for me to sue the Washington Post? I think I have a case. A lot of the evidence is in my book The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi.

In the aftermath of my recent Chronicles piece about New York Times reporter David Enrich, who wrote to me saying he had regrets about his 2018 hit pieces on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, my suspicion is that my case is even stronger than I previously thought.

As Chronicles readers will know, Kavanaugh, a high school classmate of mine, was accused of sexual assault in 2018 when he was nominated to the Court. His accuser, a woman named Christine Blasey Ford, claimed the attack happened sometime in the ’80s also claimed that I was in the room when it happened. As I have written, the entire thing was a criminal scam—including the role of the partisan corporate media in covering it.

Enrich hinted that he knows this. “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my role in the Kavanaugh coverage, he told me,” 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.” Then he added this: “I can’t imagine what it was like for you to go thru that.”

No. He can’t. So should I sue the media for their lies?

I’ve thought about it many times in the years since the Kavanaugh episode, but with Enrich coming forward, it strikes me that my case, especially against The Washington Post, is even stronger than it seemed at first. I’m not a lawyer and welcome any advice from those who are lawyers, but to me there are at least three instances where I have a case against the Post.

The first involves Emma Brown, the reporter who broke the Blasey Ford story on Sept. 17, 2018. Brown was in contact with Ford on July 10, the day after Brett was nominated. On July 11, Brown sent me this email:

Dear Mark,

I’m a reporter at the Washington Post, and I’m
reaching out to see if you have a few minutes to
talk with me about Georgetown Prep. I would be
grateful for your help understanding what is
special about the school, and what Brett
Kavanaugh was like as a classmate there.
Please give me a call, or let me know how best to reach you.

Thank you!

There was nothing in her note about a sexual assault, nothing about Blasey Ford.

In her story, Brown recounted what she represented as Ford’s telling of events. However, she left out that Ford had claimed a girl named Leland Keyser was at the party where this alleged assault was supposed to have taken place. This caught the eye of Kimberly Strassel at The Wall Street Journal, who noted that it undercut Ford’s claims. Why did Brown leave Keyser out of her story? Easy. Leland Keyser denied the party ever took place, or even knowing Brett Kavanaugh. Brown intentionally left Keyser out of her piece because including that detail would have destroyed Ford’s credibility. Keyser eventually said she “has no confidence” in Ford’s story at all.

I know in libel cases one has to prove something called “premeditated malice.” I think Brown leaving Ford out of her July 11 email to me, then intentionally leaving known information from an exonerating witness out of her breaking news story, demonstrates what I would call premeditated malice. If it doesn’t exemplify that, I don’t know what else to call it.

The second actionable incident could be a piece that ran in the Post on Oct. 22, 2018. The headline: “A writer mined his ’80s adolescence in the D.C. suburbs. Then came the Kavanaugh hearings.” The article, by Rebecca Nelson, is a profile of Mike Sacks. Sacks is a comedy writer who grew up in Maryland. He has a lot of slanderous and libelous things to say about me, Brett Kavanaugh, and our friends, even though Sacks doesn’t know any of us. He’s never laid eyes on me, Brett, or anyone else we grew up with.

You read that correctly. For a story about me and Brett Kavanaugh, The Washington Post profiled a man who’s never even met us. Here is Exhibit A:

In September—as the lives of privileged kids in Reagan-era suburban Washington became something of a national obsession after Christine Blasey Ford accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her at a party in 1982—the outside world seemed to invade Sacks’s turf. At one point during Ford’s testimony, a map flashed across the screen identifying where Ford, Kavanaugh and other people she’d said were at the party all lived. “I could see where I grew up,” Sacks says. “That was all very surreal … to hear very specific elements of my childhood mentioned before the Senate and the world.” When Kavanaugh’s high school friend (and a witness, Ford said, to the alleged assault) Mark Judge was found far from the hearing, in Bethany Beach, Del., with a car strewn with comic books and clothes, Sacks tweeted, “I wrote about Brett Kavanaugh and Mark Judge and their type in my new book. I didn’t. But I did. If that makes sense. Maryland!!!”

Nelson then offers this astonishing admission:

For the record, Sacks didn’t go to Georgetown Prep in Bethesda, the school Kavanaugh and Judge attended. He went to public school. He didn’t belong to a country club, just the neighborhood pool. But growing up in Montgomery County, he says he spent time with “this entitled type,” as he referred to Kavanaugh. “Things had a tendency to happen while you were around them,” he says. “When they got drunk, all bets were off.”

Again, I’m not a lawyer. But quoting a man who has never met us suggesting we were drunks and that “things had a tendency to happen” when people were around us or that “all bets were off” when we were drinking is slander and libel. I don’t care how deftly he tries to get away with his libel by writing that he “did but didn’t” write about me and Brett.

In fact, the very premise of us having been rich entitled kids was also a lie. In her book Supreme Ambition Ruth Marcus, despite being wrong about a lot of other things, got one thing right:

Kavanaugh and his allies later bristled at the notion that his childhood was rich and entitled, and they had a point … for all the leafy elegance of Georgetown Prep’s North Bethesda campus, for all the school’s vaunted exclusivity, in the social architecture of privileged Washington the Georgetown Prep boys were looked down on by those who went to even tonier schools, such as St. Albans and Sidwell Friends. They were viewed as less academic, more focused on sports and drinking. Getting into Yale was no big deal for St. Albans grads; it was for a kid from Georgetown Prep. “People lump it together with the private-school culture writ large, and that’s not who he is,” said one Kavanaugh friend.

The third example of an article that may be actionable was a hit piece in the Post by Avi Selk. He begins one paragraph with “What the man accused of being part of Kavanaugh’s alleged sexual assault had to say about women’s sexuality”—in what amounts to an attempt to smear me as advocating violence against women:

Judge has written dozens of columns in the decades since, including several for this newspaper. Femininity, masculinity and sexuality are perennial themes. He has written that disposable razors are too feminine, that former president Barack Obama is practically a woman, and that gay men have infiltrated the priesthood.

He has also written repeatedly about his thoughts on sexual violence, which might make him an interesting character witness if Ford’s accusations against Kavanaugh result in a prolonged public investigation.

Selk then offers this:

In general, Judge has been unsparing of men accused of assault, including the conservative Senate candidate Roy Moore, and his condemnation of male aggression sometimes bleeds into critiques on women’s behavior, as when he wrote last year for Acculturated: “There’s never any excuse to rape, a crime that I think is almost akin to murder because the rapist kills a part of the human soul. And yet what women wear and their body language also send signals about their sexuality.”

Selk’s article was later tagged with one of my favorite corrections of all time: “An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Judge considered safety razors too feminine. He took issue with disposable razors, and considered safety razors very masculine.”

Shortly after the article was published, Selk went on MSNBC and had this exchange with Ali Velshi:

VELSHI: He’s a guy who has written a lot about women, and he has expressed what he thinks women’s role in society is. What’s the Cliffs Notes version of this? 

AVI SELK (REPORTER, THE WASHINGTON POST): The Cliffs Notes is he’s never used the words, but he’s the type of person that are sometimes referred to disparagingly as men’s rights activists. He writes about his notion of femininity and masculinity, whereas masculinity is like a man being a man, that quote about unbridled male passion, he’s a fan of, you know, movie scenes of guys, you know, violently taking women and doing things to them. 

I “never used the words” men’s activist “because up until the time Selk appeared on TV I had no idea what a men’s rights activist was. If anything, up until that time, I had always thought that women are more moral, not to mention wiser and less foolish, than us men. I never felt the need to become an activist for something called men’s rights. Selk’s hit was false, malicious, and damaged my reputation.

Finally, there is an honorable mention hit that may be actionable against the Post. Marty Baron, the “legendary” editor who ran The Washington Post from 2012 to 2021, writes about me in his 2023 memoir, Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post.  I have been calling Baron out on social media and formally requesting that his former paper give me space to defend myself against what he wrote. Baron quotes a letter Christine Blasey Ford wrote, a letter which was false. Baron also praises Post reporter Emma Brown, who, as I have noted above, broke the Ford story, tried to fool me into talking to her, left out the testimony of exonerating witnesses in her story, and never explained why she did any of this. Baron carries this lie forward and is too much of a coward to face me about it.

Because I had a wild youth and have never been rich or famous, for years after the Kavanaugh nightmare I thought perhaps I should just be glad to have survived it. Yet the more I have thought about it and the more I heard from friends and family who were also damaged and hurt by what happened to me, the more I came to realize that their coverage brutalized me and my friends from high school. I’m a good man with a conscience and a heart. I have written myself about my youthful indiscretions and have not tried to hide anything about my past. I am not the person depicted in Post’s stories about me.

I’m also humble enough to ask for advice from those who know more than me when I need it. So to the lawyers out there who care: Do I have a case?