Kavanaugh and the Blackout Theory is a very interesting, instructive piece in the NY Times about alcoholic blackouts, by Sarah Hepola (Ms. Hepola is the author of the best-selling memoir “Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget.”) Hope everyone can access the whole piece. Like others, I found it very helpful.
One of the trickiest things about blackouts is that you don’t necessarily know you’re having one. I wrote a memoir, so centered around the slips of memory caused by heavy drinking that it is actually called “Blackout,” and in the years since its 2015 release, I’ve heard from thousands of people who experienced them. No small number of those notes contain some version of this: “For years, I was having blackouts without knowing what they were.” Blackouts are like a philosophical riddle inside a legal conundrum: If you can’t remember a thing, how do you know it happened?
I want to be clear, up front, that I cannot know whether Judge Kavanaugh experienced a blackout. But what I do know is that blackouts are both common and tragically misunderstood.
Before the prosecutor Rachel Mitchell was mysteriously dispatched, she was aiming toward the above line of inquiry.
“Have you ever passed out from drinking?” she asked.
Kavanaugh’s answer was dismissive but slightly confusing: “I’ve gone to sleep, but I’ve never blacked out. That’s the allegation? That’s wrong.”
A few clarifications. First, I dare you to find the heavy drinker who hasn’t passed out from too much booze. To say you were just sleeping is like my dad saying he’s resting his eyes when he’s napping. It’s a semantic dodge.
Second, and more crucially, this answer tips toward a common conflation of the act of passing out — sliding into unconsciousness, eyes closed, being what drinkers often call “dead to the world” — and the act of blacking out, a temporary, alcohol-induced state in which you can remain functional and conversational, but later you will have no memory of what you did, almost as though your brain failed to hit the “record” button. This phenomenon remains unknown to many, even experts who ought to know better — doctors, journalists, judges.
This piece supports what has struck me as painfully obvious about Brett Kavanaugh's testimony - I believe he very well understands he could have done the very bad thing Ms Ford claims he did to her, while having no memory of it. I think he makes this clear by his evasive and/or belligerent, often ludicrous, responses to questions aimed at getting to the truth about his drinking.
Incredibly, I hear some claim if Kavanaugh had JUST admitted the heavy drinking -- the "young and stupid" stuff -- it would've helped his defense against Ford's (and others) sexual assault allegation, taken him (and us) off that road to his destruction. But it’s plainly disingenuous or naive to say his drinking history can be neatly siloed off from sexual misconduct, as if the hunger for the truth would've been sated by just those truthful answers.
It’s obvious why Brett Kavanaugh MUST dissemble about his heavy drinking - for exactly the reasons this piece describes. Christine Ford's claims become even more credible when his denials are quite plausibly due to inebriated blackouts, which become, in his words, "I didn’t ever do such a thing." Once he admits the truth about his beer saturated past, he would, to use well worn legal jargon, "open the door" to his judges and jury (the Senate, all of us), to the big taboo of sexual assault, which also happens to be a serious crime.
So he MUST cloak his drunken past, even if with transparently inadequate cover, e.g., "spicy food" and a "weak stomach," which made him "ralph,"; using “blackout” against Sen. Klobachur; etc.) He has to use this to shield himself because, really, it's all he’s got.