Sixty-five female character witnesses for Kavanaugh from his high school years. And as @courtneymilan notes, he went to an all-boys high school.
Wonder how many of these signatories knew that they were vouching for someone who'd been accused of attempted rape at the time they knew him? My guess is the answer is zero.
The standard model for this kind of testimonial is that it comes from women who know what he's been accused of but support him anyway. This (almost certainly) isn't even that.
It's going to be interesting to see how many of the Kavanaugh letter's signatories back away from it once they learn he's been accused of attempted rape. This just became a very different kind of testimonial.
Here's the letter. It's dated today, but it was tweeted out by the Judiciary Committee just twenty-two minutes after the New Yorker tweeted out the Farrow story.
I'd be very interested in knowing what the signatories were told about why the letter was being written, when they were approached about it, and how recently they gave the final go-ahead for its release.
A signatory to the letter says she was first told about it last night, and agreed to sign then—so after news broke that there was an allegation, but before the nature of the allegation went public.
This piece suggests that the 65-signer letter came together yesterday via a sort of phone tree of alumnae of five high schools in the area where Kavanaugh grew up. buzzfeednews.com/article/chrisg…
Looks like a number of the women who signed the Kavanaugh letter were in touch with each other and his team through the course of the nomination, and that they reached out to others in their circles yesterday.
So a core group of supporters who knew Kavanaugh in HS mobilized as vague word broke that there was an allegation out there. They wrote the letter and gathered signatures before they knew what he was being accused of.
Which suggests that a significant number of signatories were only passingly acquainted with him in high school, but signed on now because they support his nomination to SCOTUS, or were friends of good friends of him then.
I'm thinking aloud here, but this all pretty much makes sense. Like a lot of folks, I'd assumed the letter was WH-driven and weeks in the making, but the alternate narrative doesn't set off my Spidey Sense.
A lot easier to get casual sign-ons to a letter like this yesterday than today, I'd venture.
If it's just a nonspecific anonymous possibly-third-hand rumor, it's easy to dismiss. If it's "a girl who he was at a party with says he and a friend tried to rape her," you're going to have a lot more questions before you sign.
(The first two questions being: "Do I know the girl?" and "Do I know the friend?")
Given the new timeline, I'm less convinced than I was this morning—when I wrote the top of the thread—that signatories are likely to peel off soon. But I bet the organizers rushed it out when the New Yorker story broke.
TLDR: It's plausible to me that the letter came together in an ad-hoc way over the last couple of days, and isn't something the GOP has been sitting on. But it's a near-meaningless document—a generic statement of support from his supporters from before the rape story broke.
(And of course, as a zillion women have noted today, ANY such testimonial is essentially meaningless—rapists don't typcially broadcast the fact that they're rapists, and abusers tend to cultivate networks of people who'll vouch for them.)
