Deborah Ramirez’s allegation against Brett Kavanaugh surfaced during the final, increasingly contested stage of Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination. Its publication intensified the portrayal of him as facing more than one accusation, while the New York Times’ separate reporting raised questions about what could responsibly be asserted as fact. The episode makes the book’s central tension concrete: taking an allegation seriously and applying rigorous verification are related duties, not opposing ones.

The allegation and its timing

On Sunday, September 23, 2018, The New Yorker published Ramirez’s account of an incident at a party when she and Kavanaugh were classmates at Yale University. Ramirez alleged that Kavanaugh exposed himself to her while they were at the party, and that contact occurred as she tried to push him away. She recalled being intoxicated and having difficulty reconstructing the episode. In the account published by the magazine, she said that after considering her recollections for six days, she had become certain of Kavanaugh’s role.

The timing made the allegation consequential well beyond the recollection of a single event. The Kavanaugh hearings were already approaching a scheduled confrontation between Ford and senators. The book describes Ramirez’s allegation as arriving alongside another set of claims: at practically the same moment, Michael Avenatti used Twitter to publicize allegations from a client he had not identified, concerning alleged assaults at Washington, D.C., house parties. Taken together, the claims abruptly changed the political picture, presenting Kavanaugh as a possible repeat offender rather than a nominee facing only Ford’s allegation. Their simultaneous arrival did not, however, make their sources or evidentiary foundations equivalent.

What the reporting established—and did not

The New Yorker had something the Times did not: an interview with Ramirez. Its article also disclosed important limits. It had no eyewitness to the alleged incident; an unnamed classmate said he had heard about it but had not seen it. People Ramirez recalled as attending the party denied that the incident occurred or said they could not remember the party. Her own uncertainty about her memory, and the six days she spent assessing it, were part of the account rather than details that could simply be omitted.

The Times was conducting its own reporting. Its journalists had interviewed dozens of Kavanaugh’s former classmates and hallmates, but found no one with firsthand knowledge of the incident. The Times also learned that Ramirez had told some former Yale classmates she could not be certain Kavanaugh was the person who exposed himself. The editors’ conclusion was limited: on the basis of their reporting, the allegation was not sufficiently supported for them to publish it as a standalone follow-up. They were not claiming to know what had happened at the party, and their decision did not establish that Ramirez was mistaken. It marked a boundary between reporting that identified a serious allegation and reporting that could independently corroborate it to the publication’s standard.

That distinction mattered because a competing publication had already made the claim public. The Times did not merely reproduce The New Yorker’s account as if its own reporting had confirmed it. Instead, it continued investigating and, in an article about the politics of Ford’s impending testimony, mentioned Ramirez’s allegation while describing the difference in the Times’ findings. It did not include Avenatti’s unnamed client’s allegations in that article. The book presents these choices as editorial judgments about source access, corroboration, and fairness—not as a final verdict on either allegation.

The standards debate around #MeToo

By 2018, the public argument over #MeToo had broadened from whether women’s accounts should be heard to how allegations should be evaluated and what accountability required. “Believe Women” became a prominent catchphrase. Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey were sympathetic to its purpose, having spent their careers bringing women’s accounts into print, but they also emphasized journalism’s obligation to scrutinize, verify, check, and question information. In their view, the impact of the Weinstein investigation had depended in part on broad agreement about the facts, achieved through extensive reporting rather than an instruction to suspend scrutiny.

The book sets the Ramirez reporting against a media environment in which some exposés rested on deep investigation and on-the-record evidence, while others relied on a single source or an unnamed accuser. Some stories prompted further allegations and evidence; others appeared one-sided and raised questions about fairness to people facing accusations. The contrast helps explain why the Times’ decision is described with care: the editors neither declared the allegation false nor treated its seriousness as sufficient reason to publish it without stronger support.

The surrounding history of harassment reporting also gives that caution a second edge. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission could hold information about companies with many harassment charges yet be prohibited from making those records public; prospective employees could not consult the agency for an employer’s harassment history. In an earlier encounter, a woman Megan Twohey located would discuss a resolved dispute with Miramax only through carefully restricted language, reflecting the constraints of a settlement. These examples are not evidence about Ramirez’s allegation. They show the broader difficulty of making claims and institutional records visible, and why careful reporting must attend both to barriers that silence people and to the evidence available to substantiate a particular account.

Significance and limits

Ramirez’s allegation altered the public framing of Kavanaugh’s nomination, but the book preserves the distinction between political consequence and evidentiary resolution. The New Yorker published her account; the Times’s independent reporting did not supply enough corroboration for a standalone follow-up; and the editors continued to report rather than treating either publication or nonpublication as a settled finding about the event. The episode therefore resists two simplifications: that listening requires journalists to accept every claim without examination, or that an inability to corroborate an allegation proves it untrue. Its significance lies in showing how difficult that distinction becomes when a nomination, a public debate over sexual misconduct, and uneven access to evidence converge.