A glimpse of the teenage years
Ok that’s it. From the Times:
Brett Kavanaugh’s page in his high school yearbook offers a glimpse of the teenage years of the man who is now President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee: lots of football, plenty of drinking, parties at the beach. Among the reminiscences about sports and booze is a mysterious entry: “Renate Alumnius.”
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 [last name], then a student at a nearby Catholic girls’ school.
The Times gives her last name, but I was alerted to this news by a suitably angry post from Lindsay Beyerstein pointing out that the Times redacts people’s names all the time for the flimsiest of reasons but didn’t see fit to redact this one, and that’s infuriating. Yes it is.
But the story itself…that is fucking disgusting. That man must not be on the Supreme Court. Boys don’t say that kind of thing out of affection or gratitude; it’s slut-shaming. Boys importune girls for sex and call them sluts in the same breath.
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 that’s who he was in high school. He was a cruel entitled bullying pig who joined with other cruel entitled bullying pigs to leave a permanent slut-taunt at a high school girl in their yearbook. That’s who he is.
(Now, scrolling down on the Times story, I see a headline “Pigs All the Way Down” – yes, exactly.)
Ironically, Renate X is one of the 65 women who signed a letter saying how awesome Kavanaugh is. She wasn’t aware of the yearbook item then.
“I learned about these yearbook pages only a few days ago,” Ms. X 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.”
Oh, we all know what it means. The meaning is hideously obvious.
Alexandra Walsh, a lawyer for Judge Kavanaugh, said in a statement: “Judge Kavanaugh was friends with Renate [X] in high school. He admired her very much then, and he admires her to this day.
“Judge Kavanaugh and Ms. [X] 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. [X] attended that one high school event together and nothing else.”
Bull shit.
Some of Judge Kavanaugh’s high school peers said there was a widespread culture at the time of objectifying women.
“People claiming that they had sex with other people was not terribly unusual, and it was not terribly believable,” said William Fishburne, who was in Judge Kavanaugh’s graduating class and was a manager for the football team. “Not just Brett Kavanaugh and his particular group, but all the classmates in general. People would claim things they hadn’t done to sort of seem bigger than they were, older than they were.”
“People.” It was an all-boys school. It wasn’t “people,” it was boys.
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. “There was a lot of talk and presumably a lot of action about sexual conquest with girls,” Mr. Barbot said.
“Sexual conquest,” aka rape. If it’s conquest, then it’s rape.
Ms. Dolphin was a subject of that braggadocio, according to Mr. Hagan and another classmate, who requested anonymity because he fears retribution. They said Judge Kavanaugh and his friends were seeking to memorialize their supposed conquests with the “Renate” yearbook references.
“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.
Others say it was just what everybody did, no big deal, lighten up, boys will be boys, yadda yadda.
Michael Walsh, another Georgetown Prep alumnus, also listed himself on his personal yearbook page as a “Renate Alumnus.” Alongside some song lyrics, he included a short poem: “You need a date / and it’s getting late / so don’t hesitate / to call Renate.”
[That’s how it’s pronounced? Weird.]
Mr. Walsh, a bank executive in Virginia, was one of scores of Georgetown Prep alumni who signed a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee leaders vouching for Judge Kavanaugh’s “sharp intellectual ability, affable nature, and a practical and fair approach devoid of partisan purpose.” He did not respond to requests for comment.
Ms. Dolphin was aware that members of Judge Kavanaugh’s clique were reciting that poem, according to a person familiar with her thinking. She told the football players that she found it offensive, believing it made her seem like a cheap date, and she asked them to stop.
A cheap date, a desperate date, a will say yes to anyone date – aka a slut. The poem is a slut-shame poem.
That man should never be on the Supreme Court.
This is just the sort of man a lot of people (sorry, men) want on the Supreme Court, because they believe (probably rightly) that he will be willing to find against any regulation that seeks to limit or end rape culture. It’s their right, they believe, to treat women as objects of their own pleasure, and I suspect they believe it is somewhere within the Constitution – maybe in that old “pursuit of happiness” clause that almost everyone I meet thinks is in the Constitution. And, of course, pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness is for men, because if they pursue their “happiness” by conquest of women, the women lose their liberty and their happiness – and in some cases, their life.
Yeah, right.
People = male humans, of course. So all-boys schools are full of people; those attending the all-girls schools are their playthings.
And those attending the public schools? Well, that just means the males have easier access to their playthings, because they can grabby-pokey right there on the school grounds without having to go to a house party to find the girls.
I really hope the Senate delves deeply into that yearbook entry. There area a lot of things in there that reek of alcohol abuse and rape culture, contrary to the squeaky clean image he tried to present on Fox last night.
There’s quite a bit more on him and Judge here, including an email from his time in the Bush administration regarding a boat trip in which he “claims he doesn’t recall getting ‘aggressive’ after a dice game didn’t go his way and urges his fellow bros to maintain confidentiality ‘including with spouses.'”
Choir boy, that one.
Catholicism is a badge of disgrace. Anything that man does or says to promote the ideology of Christianity, particularly vapid worship of Catholic dogma should be met with the deepest disgust.
What people do in high school is often dumb. Nevertheless if he denies anything (i.e., lies) about not having done stupid (or egregious) things then he should be removed from all public offices, not just this insane trip to Supreme Court nomination.
It’s a curious thing about the whole ‘bragging about sex you haven’t had’ thing. I do know of girls who did it, too, but as always in our culture, it happens differently. The girls are always coy and circumvent any naming of names, especially if the sex (or other, specific preliminary activities) never happened. She might sit down during a game of “Never I Never” when it came to a question of oral sex, for instance, but she wouldn’t say which guy was the recipient.
Boys, on the other hand, were almost invariably quite specific in identifying their specific ‘conquest’. That the girl’s reputation would become synonymous with being sexually available didn’t dissuade them at all, and of course, the girl was in a ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ situation when it came to denial–the mere act of denying it would convince people it actually must’ve happened. (In actual fact, I think a lot of times, guys were MORE likely to ‘name names’ if they were lying, because it was also seen as an acceptable act of revenge against a girl who had denied them sex.)
a) ‘Renate’ seems to have had no hesitation about endorsing Kavanaugh, before she realized that she was another victim.
b) Not much comment about the fact that Kavanaugh’s drinking was illegal in prep school. Nor about the way alcohol is weaponized against women too young to recognize its effects, or identified as particularly vulnerable. Note the reports of Mark Judge and his cronies mixing
as a ‘girls only’ drink. For the express purpose of incapacitating victims. This is the same behavior as using rohypnol.
A third woman has come forth with a sworn affidavit, and her accusations are far worse: drugging girls at parties so that boys can gang rape them.
Lawrence O’Donnell went on at some length last night about how illegal all Kavanaugh’s high school drinking was, because the age limit was 21 when he was in high school. Kavanaugh’s been saying he never drank illegally, so he’s been lying. To our faces. On camera.
JOHN @ 7, yes it is identical behaviour. A few years back when there had been a spate of suspected date rapes in our city, one of the senior police commanders spoke about the issue. He made the point that based on what police deal with every weekend, the most common and effective date rape drug in use was alcohol.
Rob, back when I worked nightclub doors we identified a type of man who would appear as the club was turning out. They were on the lookout for lone, drunk women on foot who were heading away from the crowds, and would follow them, much like predators on the Serengeti picking out the easy targets from the herd.
There was very little we could do except try to persuade the women to stay close to others, or get in a taxi (despite the often one-hour or more wait as the cabs were swamped) or, if any police were around, point out the problem men (‘Nothing we can really do, they’re not comitting a crime just being there’ being the usual response. Some of us even resorted to taking women home ourselves, though our offers of a lift were too often understandably met with suspicion and refused.
I dread to think how many assaults or rapes were comitted by those men, and they even had the ‘luxury’ of not having had to pay to get the women drunk in the first place.
Yikes! I’m not surprised at the police reaction. They’ve always been better at scraping the bits up than preventing crime in the first place. The thought of men coming down to the watering hole to hunt at close of play is new to me though. I always thought the hunters were at the hole too. I’ve led a sheltered life…
Maybe ‘predators’ was the wrong word, Rob. They were more ‘scavenger-hunters’ preying on those that the ‘alpha’ hunters had either missed or decided weren’t worthy of their money/attention. Probably akin to jackals taking what the lions left for them. Vile bastards, whatever one likens them to.
Agreed. Shudder.