The Hollywood Stasi and their botched anti-Kavanaugh film

A new surprise documentary recently played at the Sundance Film Festival. Justice looks into the sexual misconduct allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. The film is being sold by filmmaker Doug Liman, who kept its existence a secret for years before premiering it to a sold-out theater surrounded by armed guards.

The verdict is that Justice is a nothing burger, with no new evidence and even the Hollywood reporters

calling it “a nonevent.”

I haven’t seen the film, but I was approached about it by Liman late last year. I played a role in the Kavanaugh confirmation battle when a woman named Christine Blasey Ford claimed that I was in the room when she was assaulted by a teenage Brett Kavanaugh in 1982. Ford famously could not remember the time or place of the alleged incident, and her claim was rebuked by a close friend of Ford’s who said Ford had also been at the party.

I wrote a book about my experience in

The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi
. My thesis is that the media, opposition researchers, and Hollywood form a new American Stasi, similar to the old East German secret police. They use extortion, intimidation, and threats to destroy the lives of others, ignoring any facts or evidence that point away from their narrative.

Justice is a great example. My suspicion is that Liman and his crew were working on a heavily propagandistic film for years and were not expecting my book to drop. I was in
their blind spot
. When it was published, they tried to get me to New York, “all expenses paid,” and ambush me. It reminded me of when Ronan Farrow called me in September 2018 to tell me that I was in a letter accusing Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, but Farrow could not say who the accuser was or where it allegedly happened — only that it had taken place ” in the 1980s.”

A lot of people were traumatized by the events of 2018, and they weren’t all women. The sneaky way Liman and his crew went about approaching me was a terrible flashback to the darkness of 2018, when opposition researchers, extortionists, and crazy people tried everything to make me lie.

After first contacting me, Liman and his crew asked me to sign a non-disclosure agreement. They then (and this was truly incredible) ignored my agent, contacting me three times after I had made it clear to talk only to my representative. They could have avoided a lot of the embarrassment that occurred at Sundance if they had behaved with some journalistic honor.

Then again, Liman is not a journalist. He’s a filmmaker who has admitted to stretching the facts to tell a story. His movie american made, for example, is the story of Barry Seal, a real-life Louisiana TWA pilot-turned-drug smuggler for the Medellin Cartel who got rich in the 1970s and 1980s before turning into a Drug Enforcement Agency informer. American made is for people who find Oliver Stone too subtle. Liman has called the film
“a fun lie based on a true story.”

Liman and his associate Amy Herdy — who has been criticized for omitting key facts
from previous documentaries
— have talked about the “bravery” of the people who spoke to them for Justice, implying that there was a campaign in 2018 to keep people quiet. In my experience, the campaign was to get people to lie. As Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) said after seeing the FBI report, “Anybody who thinks this is a search for the truth and not about politics ought to
put down the bong.”
(
Michael Avenati
who charged that Brett and I presided over 10 high school parties where girls were drugged and gang raped, is now serving over 20 years in prison for extortion.)

notably, Justice does not include an interview with Christine Blasey Ford. To do so would be to open the door to questions about Leland Keyser, Ford’s friend. In 2019, Keyser revealed to Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, two reporters for the New York Times, that
she did not believe Ford’s story
. Further, Keyser said she felt threatened to change her story. “We spoke multiple times to Keyser, who also said that she didn’t recall that get-together or any others like it,” Pogrebin and Kelly reported in their book The Education of Brett Kavanaugh. “In fact, she challenged Ford’s accuracy. ‘I don’t have any confidence in the story.'”

So not in Justice is the fact that Blasey Ford’s father
apologized
to Brett’s father.

The reaction to Keyser’s honesty was vindictive. Some of Ford’s friends pressed her to substantiate Ford’s testimony “even if she could not corroborate Ford’s more specific memories,” the New York Times revealed. A group text was formed in which people discussed how to get Keyser to bury me and Brett. At one point, an anonymous man in the group suggested that they defame Keyser and reveal their struggle with addiction. “I was told behind the scenes that certain things could be spread about me if I didn’t comply,” Keyser told the reporters.

Like Keyser, I was pressured to lie. On Sept. 24, 2018, a caller from California said that I was about to get messed with (the actual language was much harsher) and that I should call them back to make sure that didn’t happen. I reported the call to the FBI. There were also frightening and crazy things that happened, people accusing me of all kinds of crimes in states and cities I’d never been to. The FBI also knows about these dark threats, which are too serious to relive now.

Apparently, the main focus of Justice is the allegations made by Kavanaugh’s Yale classmate Deborah Ramirez, which were detailed in a new Yorker article in 2018. Ramirez alleged that at a gathering with friends when she was a freshman in 1983, Kavanaugh pulled down his pants and thrust his penis at her. Kavanaugh has denied those claims.

Here, too, the people involved reported being coerced by Brett’s enemies to support his accusers. In 2019, Lara Bazelon, an associate professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law and a contributing writer to political magazine,

wrote a piece
about the Kavanaugh accusations. Bazelon, a liberal who did not support Brett, nonetheless found the activity of those against his nomination “troubling.” She described how Ramirez reached out to friends in the fall of 2018 to see if they could back up her account. One of these friends was Karen Yarasavage.

Instead of supporting Ramirez, Yarasavage signed a statement to the new Yorker along with five classmates, including two of the three witnesses that Ramirez had said were present during the assault. The statement read, in part: “We can say with confidence that if the incident that Debbie alleges ever occurred, we would have seen or heard about it — and we did not.”

Yarasavage also claimed Robin Pogrebin of the New York Times Tried to force her to support Ramirez.
As Mollie Hemingway reported
Yarasavage recalled that Pogrebin had called her up as an old Yale friend, failing to note that the purpose of the call was to write a hit piece on Kavanaugh.

Kelley and Pogrebin ended up describing Yarasavage and others who did not support Ramirez as “not returning the loyalty” of Ramirez. “Why this public statement is ‘disloyal’ is not explained,” Lara Bazelon observed in political. “Did the authors believe Ramirez’s friends and classmates should have remained silent about what they knew and believed to be true because they were contradicting her?”

They do. If you don’t say what our American Stasi tells you to say, they will find a way to crush you.

After the Sundance dud, the producers of Justice announced they are still working and have opened a tip line. They are like the ever vigilant eyes of the East German secret police in The Lives of Others. No doubt calls will come from Terminal Island Correctional Facility, Michael Avenatti’s new home.

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Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of
The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi
. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, other A Tremor of Bliss.