KAVANAUGH’S TEEN YEARS Will what happened at Georgetown Prep stay there?

To the uninitiated, Georgetown Preparatory School feels less like a high school than a well-heeled liberal arts college. The 93-acre campus in the North Bethesda, Md., suburb of the nation’s capital boasts a state-of-the-art athletic center, a nine-hole golf course and its own gift shop. Gardeners crisscross the grounds on carts.

This is where U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh spent most of his teen years. And exactly what happened one summer night during that time has become a question that threatens to unravel his chances of joining the nation’s highest court.

Multiple accounts from 1980sera classmates depict an alcoholsoaked party culture among the close-knit network of single-sex, mostly Roman Catholic private schools in the country’s wealthiest state.

At raucous house parties and drunken beach vacations, boys from Georgetown Prep and other all-male academies would meet up with students from nearby all-girl private schools like Stone Ridge, Holy Cross, Georgetown Visitation and the non-sectarian Holton-Arms School. Binge drinking was a routine part of the social scene, with minimal adult supervision.

California college professor Christine Blasey Ford, a 1984 graduate of Holton-Arms, has accused Kavanaugh, who graduated Georgetown Prep in 1983, of pinning her down in a locked bedroom and groping her during a drunken house party when she was about 15 and he was about 17.

As details of the allegation emerged, a video clip from a 2015 speech Kavanaugh made at Catholic University’s law school circulated online, prompting some to view the comments in a more disturbing context. In the speech, Kavanaugh referenced some old friends and jokingly referred to an unofficial motto at his alma mater.