Brett Kavanaugh’s Georgetown Prep yearbook

Brett Kavanaugh’s Georgetown Prep yearbook became a contested piece of evidence during his Senate testimony: a phrase in its pages drew public attention, and his explanation of it exposed a conflict over what the record meant and whose account could be trusted.

The phrase and its competing meanings

The yearbook entry at issue was “Devil’s Triangle.” During testimony, Kavanaugh called it a drinking game. The account contrasts that explanation with the phrase’s widely recognized meaning as high-school slang for a sexual liaison involving two men and a woman. The yearbook thus appeared in the hearing not simply as a record of school life but as an object whose language had become evidence under public scrutiny.

Role in the hearing

The dispute over the yearbook phrase unfolded alongside challenges to Kavanaugh’s account of Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation. He said Ford’s story had been “refuted by the very people she says were there, including by a longtime friend of hers.” The book identifies that statement as untrue: Leland Keyser had told the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, through a letter from her attorney, that she did not remember the gathering and did not know Kavanaugh; she had also told The Washington Post that she believed Ford was telling the truth. The passage places the yearbook’s disputed wording within a wider contest over testimony and credibility, rather than treating it as an isolated schoolboy expression.

When Senator Amy Klobuchar asked whether Kavanaugh had ever partially or fully blacked out from drinking, he responded by asking whether she had. The exchange added drinking to the hearing’s scrutiny of the yearbook phrase, but the account records no resolution of what the phrase originally meant. Its significance in the scene rests instead on the gap between Kavanaugh’s explanation and the meaning attributed to the words, a gap made consequential by the testimony around it.