"I never thought I’d be urging my daughter to attend parties with drinking, drugs and who knows what else, but..."

"... if she doesn’t experiment now, in the safe space of a nurturing high school and a loving home, won’t she be awkwardly out of step with her peers when she starts college next year?," writes Debby Berman in "I worry my homebody teen is too much like me. But she has something I didn’t at her age" (WaPo).

Is she isolating herself to her own detriment? The truth is that although she isn’t the life-of-the-party teenager I expected, she is hauntingly familiar. When I was her age, I hung out mainly with one close friend, color-coded my class notes and never partied or touched trouble...

College was an awkward awakening. The first frat party I was lured to, just a few days into freshman year, turned me off from ever attending another one. Nothing bad happened, I just hated the whole scene....

The hidden, unspoken similarity between mother and child unnerves me. Why does she delay drinking, drugs and romantic encounters when she has opportunities to engage? No one guided her to this slow path, and no one is holding her there, at least not that I’m aware of.....

My thoughts, in order: 1. I'd worry about this too, 2. Is this about Kavanaugh? 3. No, not even mentioned! Weird. 4. Humblebragging.

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Julie Swetnick "said she witnessed Judge Kavanaugh... lining up outside a bedroom where 'numerous boys' were 'waiting for their "turn" with a girl inside the room.'"

"Ms. Swetnick said she was raped at one of the parties, and she believed she had been drugged. None of Ms. Swetnick’s claims could be independently corroborated by The New York Times, and her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, declined to make her available for an interview.... Unlike two other women who have accused Judge Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, one who went to college with him and another who went to a sister high school, Ms. Swetnick offered no explanation in her statement of how she came to attend the same parties, nor did she identify other people who could verify her account.... In her statement, Ms. Swetnick said that she met Judge Kavanaugh and Mr. Judge in 1980 or 1981 when she was introduced to them at a house party in the Washington are... She said she attended at least 10 house parties in the Washington area from 1981 to 1983 where the two were present. She said the parties were common, taking place almost every weekend during the school year. She said she observed Judge Kavanaugh drinking 'excessively' at many of the parties and engaging in 'abusive and physically aggressive behavior toward girls, including pressing girls against him without their consent, "grinding" against girls, and attempting to remove or shift girls’ clothing to expose private body parts. I also witnessed Brett Kavanaugh behave as a "mean drunk" on many occasions at these parties.'"

The NYT reports today.

If the allegations are true, there must be many, many other witnesses. Where have they been all these weeks? And why would she go to "at least 10 house parties" if they were as she described?

The NYT suggests there's a gap in the account because Swetnick doesn't say how she got to go to the same parties as Kavanaugh. We're told Swetnick grew up in Montgomery County, Md., and graduated from Gaithersburg High School — a public school — in 1980 and attended the University of Maryland. That puts her in a less elite crowd. She's also 2 years older than Kavanaugh and graduated from high school 3 years before he did, so it makes it a little hard to picture them at the same parties. Did older, state-college women go to parties with prep school boys years younger than them? If they did and the boys raped them, repeatedly and systematically, how could the boys get away with it, and why are there not many more women coming forward with the same allegations? And why are we getting this through Michael Avenatti?

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The NYT lobs a confusing new issue into the Kavanaugh controversy: the phrase "Renate Alumni" in the yearbook at Kavanaugh's high school.

It's really hard to summarize "Kavanaugh’s Yearbook Page Is ‘Horrible, Hurtful’ to a Woman It Named." My first question is: Who wrote the words in the yearbook? If not Brett Kavanaugh, why must I understand this? And why is the NYT choosing to dilute the carefully built up allegation made by Christine Blasey Ford? Is that allegation fading somehow? Is the NYT trying to get hits after it passed up the Deborah Ramirez story that had us all reading The New Yorker last Sunday?

I don't want to quote too much of the article, but I can't paraphrase what I can't understand, so forgive me:

The word “Renate” appears at least 14 times in Georgetown Preparatory School’s 1983 yearbook, on individuals’ pages and in a group photo of nine football players, including Judge Kavanaugh, who were described as the “Renate Alumni.” It is a reference to Renate Schroeder, then a student at a nearby Catholic girls’ school.

Two of Judge Kavanaugh’s classmates say the mentions of Renate were part of the football players’ unsubstantiated boasting about their conquests. “They were very disrespectful, at least verbally, with Renate,” said Sean Hagan, a Georgetown Prep student at the time, referring to Judge Kavanaugh and his teammates. “I can’t express how disgusted I am with them, then and now.”

So Sean Hagan seems to have brought this tale to the NYT and we're handed his characterizations of what it all means. Who is he? The material seems too minimal to matter, so you have to tell us why it matters, and Sean Hagan is quoted. That's it! Well, who's he? What are his interests? And, again, did Kavanaugh write the yearbook text?!

This month, Renate Schroeder Dolphin joined 64 other women who..., signed a letter to the leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which...  stated that “he has behaved honorably and treated women with respect.”

So suddenly Schroeder is Dolphin. I'll just guess that's her married name. This article is carelessly written.

“I learned about these yearbook pages only a few days ago,” Ms. Dolphin said in a statement to The New York Times. “I don’t know what ‘Renate Alumnus’ actually means. I can’t begin to comprehend what goes through the minds of 17-year-old boys who write such things, but the insinuation is horrible, hurtful and simply untrue. I pray their daughters are never treated this way. I will have no further comment.”

What was said to her that made her react like that. She can't understand it, but she's also horrified by it, and she won't talk about it anymore. Was she given the Sean Hagan interpretation and shocked and that's how the NYT got her quote? And now we the NYT readers are supposed to feel her shock, because look at what she said? And she's not saying anything more.

Alexandra Walsh, a lawyer for Judge Kavanaugh, said in a statement: “Judge Kavanaugh was friends with Renate Dolphin in high school. He admired her very much then, and he admires her to this day. “Judge Kavanaugh and Ms. Dolphin attended one high school event together and shared a brief kiss good night following that event,” the statement continued. “They had no other such encounter. The language from Judge Kavanaugh’s high school yearbook refers to the fact that he and Ms. Dolphin attended that one high school event together and nothing else.”

Ms. Dolphin said she had never kissed Judge Kavanaugh. “I think Brett must have me confused with someone else, because I never kissed him,” she said through her lawyer.

Well, there's a factual discrepancy. Kavanaugh (if his lawyer has it right) believes he kissed a girl who believes he did not. It seems someone at the yearbook collected all the names of boys who said they'd kissed the same girl and made a joke out of it. But was Kavanaugh involved in the yearbook making? And does this really matter now? Dolphin had good enough memories to have signed the letter. Now, she's mad about the yearbook, and we're supposed to hold that against him?

Four of the men who were pictured with Judge Kavanaugh in a photo captioned “Renate Alumni” said it was simply a reference to their dating or going to dances with Ms. Dolphin.... Some of Judge Kavanaugh’s high school peers said there was a widespread culture at the time of objectifying women....

Bill Barbot, who was a freshman at Georgetown Prep when Judge Kavanaugh was a senior, said Judge Kavanaugh and his clique were part of the school’s “fratty” culture.

Oh! We're going to listen to the freshman's ideas about the seniors! And why are we hearing from Bill Barbot? Who is he? How did the NYT find him? And why him and not one of 100 other possibilities among all the boys in all the years when Kavanaugh went to high school?

“There was a lot of talk and presumably a lot of action about sexual conquest with girls,” Mr. Barbot said.

Presumably!!! Such extreme dilution. A freshman remembers how seniors, in general, looked to him 35 years ago.

Ms. Dolphin was a subject of that braggadocio, according to Mr. Hagan and another classmate, who requested anonymity because he fears retribution. 

Again, who is Hagan? But, look, he's bolstered by some anonymous person. And the subject is that Dolphin was a girl boys bragged about. Not Kavanaugh, specifically, but, you know, it was the sort of thing that happened. Such a weak dilution of a hint of wrongness.

“She should be offended,” Mr. Hagan said of Ms. Dolphin. “I was completely astounded when I saw she signed that letter” on Judge Kavanaugh’s behalf.

Hagan Hagan Hagan. Who the hell is he and why is the NYT running with this? It's such a weak effort at piling on the attacks that it makes the earlier attacks seem weaker.

The NYT offers this effort at defending Kavanaugh:

“These guys weren’t any different than other boys high schools across the country,” said Suzanne Matan, a friend of Judge Kavanaugh’s from their high school days. “And I chose to hang out with those boys and many other girls did, too, because they were fun, and they were safe, and they were respectful.”

I assume many readers will interpret that first sentence to mean "boys will be boys" — a damning excuse — despite the various kind — somewhat kind — words.

Finally, an answer to my question:

The Georgetown Prep yearbook’s personal pages were designed and written by the individual students, according to alumni. A faculty adviser reviewed the pages.

If that's true, it's important. Why is this crucial fact buried in the article? I'm writing about it as I go along, so I don't know what I'd have written if that had appeared in the beginning. I note that Kavanaugh's page says "Renate Alumnius." That's a typo/misspelling isn't it, "alumnius"? Isn't that evidence that he did not write it? When I was in high school, you filled out a form offering info to the  students who made the yearbook and they used that to write what they, in the end, chose.

There's more to the article — things written on other boys' pages, a caption on a photo of the football team (including Kavanaugh), a statement by 4 boys in that photo (saying "Renate" referred to "innocent dates or dance partners" and criticizing the NYT for its "twisted and forced... shabby journalism"), etc. — and that's it for this new puff of smoke.

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