A high school friend of Brett Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford said she’s skeptical of Ford’s accusing the Supreme Court justice of sexually assaulting her during a party in the 1980s.
“I don’t have any confidence in the story,” Leland Keyser told two New York Times reporters in their book “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation.”
“Those facts together I don’t recollect, and it just didn’t make any sense,” Keyser told the authors, Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly.
Ford testified at Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing that Keyser attended the Maryland house party in the summer of 1982 when Kavanaugh was 17 and Ford was 15.
Ford told the Senate Judiciary Committee last year that Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge pushed her into a room and Kavanaugh forced her onto a bed, tried to remove her bathing suit and attempted to rape her.
Keyser was downstairs when the alleged assault took place, Ford said.
Keyser threw cold water on that scenario.
“It would be impossible for me to be the only girl at a get-together with three guys, have her leave, and then not figure out how she’s getting home,” Keyser told Pogrebin and Kelly in the book that was published Tuesday. “I just really didn’t have confidence in the story.”
Her lawyer, Howard Walsh, wrote an email to the committee during the hearing to say she doesn’t known Kavanaugh and doesn’t recall being at the party with him.
But in a revised statement, Walsh said she “does not refute Dr. Ford’s account, and she has already told the press that she believes Dr. Ford’s account.”
But Keyser now says she lacks confidence in Ford’s account.
“We spoke multiple times to Keyser, who also said that she didn’t recall that get-together or others like it,” Pogrebin and Kelly wrote. “In fact, she challenged Ford’s accuracy.”
The Times issued a correction on Sunday to a story alleging sexual misconduct by Kavanaugh at a college dorm party to say the alleged victim didn’t recall the incident.
The article was adapted from Pogrebin and Kelly’s book, but didn’t include that detail. The book did.
In the correction, the newspaper said: “The book reports that the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident. That information has been added to the article.”
