In a sworn statement released through her attorney Michael Avenatti last week, Julie Swetnick made two key claims against Brett Kavanaugh:
1. He and his friend Mark Judge spiked punch with either drugs or grain alcohol in an effort to make girls more pliable and
2. He and Judge stood in line outside a bedroom waiting for their turn in a gang rape.
On Monday, however, Swetnick herself disproved both of these claims in an interview with NBC News' Kate Snow, admitting that she never saw either Kavanaugh or Judge actually spiking any punch and couldn't be sure that either Kavanaugh or Judge (or anyone else, for that matter) actually stood outside of a bedroom in anticipation of participating in a gang rape.
According to her statement, “during the years 1981-82," Swetnick "became aware of efforts by Mark Judge, Brett Kavanaugh and others to ‘spike’ the ‘punch’ at house parties I attended with drugs and/or grain alcohol so as to cause girls to lose their inhibitions and their ability to say ‘no.’”
The allegation is remarkably specific: Kavanaugh, Judge, and others spiked punch with either alcohol or drugs with the intent of initiating a gang rape. On Monday, however, Swetnick admitted that she couldn't be sure that was the case at all.
“Well, I saw [Kavanaugh] giving red Solo cups to quite a few girls during that time frame and there was green punch at those parties,” she said. “And I would not take one of those glasses from Brett Kavanaugh. I saw him around the punch, I won’t say bowls, or the punch containers.
“I don’t know what he did, but I saw him by them.”
It goes without saying that seeing Kavanaugh standing by a punch bowl is quite different than seeing him actively administering date rape drugs to unsuspecting teenage girls, and Swetnick admitted in her interview that her second claim, too, isn't quite what she initially made it out to be.
“I also witnessed efforts by Mark Judge, Brett Kavanaugh, and others to cause girls to become inebriated and disoriented so they could be then ‘gang raped’ in a side bedroom by a ‘train’ of numerous boys,” she said in her statement. “I have a firm recollection of seeing boys lined up outside rooms at many of these parties waiting their ‘turn’ with a girl inside the room. These boys included Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh.”
Again, her claim is very specific: She saw Judge and Kavanaugh and other boys "lined up outside rooms" waiting their turn to take part in the gang rapes going on inside. And again, she admitted in her NBC News interview that it wasn't true.
“Well, until [I was gang raped myself], I didn't put two and two together,” she explained. “But I would see boys standing outside of rooms, congregated together. Sort of like a gauntlet. And I didn't know what was occurring. But I would see them laughing, a lot of laughing.”
She "didn't know what was occurring" in those rooms or why exactly the boys were gathered together, but she was able to infer that because groups of boys were standing around talking to one another (you know, like people generally do at parties), there were gang rapes going on inside the rooms and the boys gathered outside were actually waiting for their turn to go in.
A reasonable person might assume that if these gang rape parties were relatively common, they would be the talk of the community and, in her interview, Swetnick maintained that "everyone in Montgomery County knew about" them.
NBC News, however, was unable to find a single person who knew about them, including four people whom Swetnick said were at one of the parties. One of her witnesses is dead, two others didn't return calls, and the fourth had no idea who Julie Swetnick is.
Just as problematic is the major inconsistency in Swetnick's timeline. In her statement, she said she "attended well over ten house parties in the Washington, D.C. area during the years 1981-1983 where Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh were present.”
In her interview, though, she said the last party she attended was the one at which she was gang raped...in 1982.
She claimed that she filed a police report with the Montgomery County Police Department immediately after she was gang raped (not, she admitted, by Kavanaugh), but coincidentally enough, the officer who took that report is dead. So is her mother, whom she claims she told immediately after the alleged incident.
As if Swetnick didn't damage her own credibility enough, her ex-boyfriend--who had to take out a restraining order against her after she made numerous threats--said she never said a word about a gang rape to him in all the years they were together.
"Never, never once [did] she mention that to me," Richard Vinneccy told FOX News. "We used to talk about everything. She never once mentioned that at all. ... If you ask me personally if I believe her, I don't believe her. I really don't believe her. Nobody knows Julie Swetnick better than me."
That's not entirely true: Julie Swetnick knows Julie Swetnick better than anyone. And even Julie Swetnick doesn't seem to believe the allegations she made in her sworn statement.
Why, one wonders, should anyone else?