A second new accusation was made in an anonymous letter sent to Senator Cory Gardner, Republican of Colorado, by a woman who said her daughter witnessed Judge Kavanaugh drunkenly push her friend, a woman he was dating, up against a wall “very aggressively and sexually” after they left a bar one night in 1998.
Her daughter and other witnesses were “shocked,” she said. “Her friend, traumatized, called my daughter yesterday, September 21, 2018, wondering what to do about it,” the woman wrote. “They decided to remain anonymous.”
Staff lawyers for the Judiciary Committee have twice questioned Judge Kavanaugh by phone about the accusations — on Sept. 17 and on Tuesday — to prepare him for the Thursday hearing. Late Wednesday, as they were preparing to grill him by phone a third time, the committee released transcripts of the earlier calls that revealed new charges under investigation and Judge Kavanaugh’s at times heated denials.
“This is crazytown,” he said at one point.
In the call Wednesday night, Judge Kavanaugh denied the new charges leveled by Mr. Avenatti’s client, Julie Swetnick, who said that in the 1980s, she witnessed Judge Kavanaugh and a friend, Mark Judge, try to get teenage girls “inebriated and disoriented so they could then be ‘gang raped.’”
Judge Kavanaugh said publicly he did not know Ms. Swetnick and called her claims “ridiculous and from the ‘Twilight Zone.’” Mr. Judge denied the accusations through a lawyer.
In another example of the frenzy surrounding Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination, the transcripts showed that committee staff also questioned him about a constituent of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, who charged — and then recanted Wednesday night — that Judge Kavanaugh had raped a woman on a boat in 1985 in Newport, R.I.
In the interview with the committee, Judge Kavanaugh fiercely said that the episode never took place.