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Book claims Brett Kavanaugh’s high school had culture of underage drinking, debauchery

A book by Brett Kavanaugh’s high school buddy hinted at a culture of depravity and alcoholism at their Washington, D.C.-area high school. One passage refers to a drunken “Bart O’Kavanaugh.”Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press/File 2018

When Christine Blasey Ford came forward with sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, she named a second man as well.

In a letter she sent to California Senator Dianne Feinstein, Ford detailed a night in the early 1980s when she was “corralled her into a bedroom during a gathering of teenagers at a house in Montgomery County.”

‘‘I thought he might inadvertently kill me,’’ Ford, a 51-year-old research psychologist in northern California, told the Post about Kavanaugh. ‘‘He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.’’

Ford said she escaped Kavanaugh’s grip when his friend, Mark Judge, “jumped on top of them, sending all three tumbling.” Both Kavanaugh and Judge were “stumbling drunk,” Ford alleged.

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Kavanaugh has denied Ford's allegations, as has Judge, who told the New York Times that Kavanaugh was a ‘‘brilliant student’’ who loved sports and was not ‘‘into anything crazy or illegal.’’

RELATED: Brett Kavanaugh, accuser will testify before Senate panel

Judge, who was Kavanaugh’s friend and classmate at Georgetown Preparatory School in Maryland, is now a conservative writer. And in a 1997 book, titled “Wasted: Tales of a GenX Drunk,” he wrote about his teenage alcoholism and private school culture filled with debauchery.

Renamed “Loyola Prep” in the book, Judge writes that “drinking was one of the major forms of recreation at Prep.”

“Seniors would often go directly from class to a bar,” he wrote, noting that the drinking age was 18 at the time.

Judge wrote that his “immersion into alcohol began at the end of [his] sophomore year, during beach week.”

Beach week, which came at the end of the school year, was a “week-long bacchanalia of drinking and sex, or at least attempts at sex,” he wrote.

Judge wrote that one of his classmates had his parents sign off on a beach house for the group and the only chaperone was an 18-year-old who bought the teenagers alcohol. The group was “flanked by girls” as teenagers from other Catholic high schools rented adjacent homes.

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“The first thing we did was throw a party,” Judge wrote.

At one point, a girl asks Judge whether he knew a “Bart O’Kavanaugh.”

“Yeah. He’s around here somewhere,” Judge writes, adding that he “passed out on his way back from a party.”

The same girl then tells Judge her father did not want her going to beach week because “[f]ifteen-year-old girls should not be alone at the beach.”

When Judge returned to school as a junior, “drinking became a pleasure central to my life,” he wrote.

Once, with his parents away for the weekend, he threw a big party at his house. So big that “[b]etween eleven and midnight a steady stream of kids poured through the front doors,” he wrote.

“Cars lined up and down my street and beyond,” Judge wrote. “I recognized seniors from Prep, and sophomores, then saw faces I had never seen before.”

Later in the book, one of Judge’s friends remarked that the school had added a graduation requirement, knowing students “go out and get tanked every weekend.”


Material from the Washington Post was used in this report. Aimee Ortiz can be reached at aimee.ortiz@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @aimee_ortiz.