Reading the reports and comments about Christine Blasey Ford and her account of her sexual assault by Brett Kavanaugh in the early 1980s has evoked memories, many unpleasant, of coming of age in the peculiar atmosphere of hyper-privilege constituted of elite private schools in Maryland and Northern Virginia and even a few elite public high schools such as my own in which a significant percentage of the student body were children of politicians, diplomats, judges, high-profile attorneys, senior civil servants, lobbyists et aliorum. While I never met Kavanaugh, who was graduated a few years before me, I certainly knew students at the elite MD/NoVa prep schools in the mid to late 1980s as neighbors, through mutual friends, through sports, through music clubs in D.C. and through parties. A friend has aptly described them as “masters of the universe” types, presumptuously confident and guided by a sense of invincibility borne of the kind of protection from consequence only privilege can guarantee. I think of it as “Lord of the Flies” with lacrosse sticks.
Christine Blasey Ford’s account rings true because while I was not at that house-party that summer, I can recall similar house-parties in suburban D.C. attended by these “masters of the universe,” rife with alcohol and drugs. Kavanaugh’s Beach Week ralphing? Hell, I remember laughing at a polaroid of our senior class president, son of a prominent politician, blowing chunks in a Jeep in Ocean City.
And sexual assaults? Yeah, I’m certain they happened at those parties in dark basement corners, beside dimly lit pools and lawns and behind locked bedroom doors. Even if a victim had come forward at the time, not shamed into silence, I’d guess that the same circle of “mover and shaker” parents who supplied the booze and drugs that fueled those surreal debaucheries and who paid for the Beach Week, Spring Break and ski weekend rentals had the means and pull to protect the assailant and his reputation.
It is beyond time to disabuse Kavanaugh of his smug privilege and the unearned and illegitimate protections derived from it, to dispense forever with the “boys will be boys” apologia, and to compel both an honest reckoning of the assault and the withdrawal of his nomination.