Wasted: Tales of a GenX Drunk

Wasted: Tales of a GenX Drunk is one of Mark Judge’s two memoirs about life at Georgetown Prep. In the account of a party culture marked by regular blackout drinking, it offered a contemporaneous-seeming glimpse into the social world surrounding Brett Kavanaugh—and became a point of reference during negotiations over Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation.

Context and Content

Judge, a recovering alcoholic, had written two memoirs about his years at Georgetown Prep. Wasted was one of them. The books described an extreme party culture in which blackout drinking was regular, placing the memoir within the broader context of the high-school social life that Ford said preceded the assault.

One episode in Wasted mentions a person called Bart O’Kavanaugh, described in the book as presumably a veiled reference to Kavanaugh. The passage recalls a night when Bart “puked in someone’s car” and “passed out on his way back from a party.” The account does not itself establish that this was the gathering Ford described; its relevance lay in what it could suggest about drinking and partying among Judge’s former friends.

Relevance to the Hearing

As Ford’s team negotiated with Chuck Grassley’s committee over the terms of her testimony, her lawyers, Debra Katz and Lisa Banks, asked that Judge be subpoenaed. Ford had identified him as Kavanaugh’s old friend and, according to her account, the other person in the room during the attack. She also recalled seeing him looking visibly uncomfortable at a neighborhood grocery store afterward, as if he felt bad about what had happened.

The memoir mattered to Ford’s team as potential corroboration of excess drinking by Kavanaugh, not as direct proof of the alleged assault. Committee staff refused the request to subpoena Judge and instead accepted his written statement: he acknowledged being friends with Kavanaugh in high school but said he did not recall such a party and had never seen Kavanaugh behave as Ford described. In the dispute over testimony and corroboration, Wasted therefore stood as an account of the party culture, while the committee’s accepted statements left the central event contested.