The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Cops: Kavanaugh interviewed after 1985 altercation at a bar
The Connecticut connections to Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh that began at Yale University now include reports of an altercation at a bar and have spread to Fairfield, where a legislative official and undergraduate classmate of Kavanaugh’s says she has text messages showing that Kavanaugh knew about accusations by their fellow classmate, Deborah Ramirez, before they were reported in the New Yorker on Sept. 23.
According to a Sept. 26, 1985, New Haven police report, Kavanaugh was involved in a fight at the former Demery’s bar in which he threw ice at another man while a friend, Christen Dudley, who later became a pro basketball player, threw a glass at the man, cutting his ear.
Another classmate of Kavanaugh’s, Charles Ludington, now a history professor at North Carolina State University, described the would-be justice as “a frequent drinker, and a heavy drinker” in a statement to the New York Times.
“When Brett got drunk, he was often belligerent and aggressive. On one of the last occasions I purposely socialized with Brett, I witnessed him respond to a semi-hostile remark, not by defusing the situation, but by throwing his beer in the man’s face and starting a fight that ended with one of our mutual friends in jail.”
The September 1985 Demery’s incident report does not list Ludington as present and Dudley’s lawyer denies that Dudley was arrested at that time. An email has been sent to Ludington asking him to clarify the discrepanices and whether they were separate incidents.
Also, Kerry Berchem, a first-term member of the Fairfield Representative Town Meeting, who graduated from Yale in 1988, a year after Kavanaugh, has been trying to turn over text messages to the FBI that show Kavanaugh knew of Ramirez’s charges, despite his denials at his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing Thursday, according to the Fairfield Citizen.
Berchem, a Democrat and lawyer with the firm Akin Gump, told NBC News that texts between her and another friend of Kavanaugh’s, Karen Yarasavage, show that the nominee asked Yarasavage to defend him.
The text messages, obtained by Hearst Connecticut Media, suggest Kavanaugh and his team were talking with former classmates about the allegations before the New Yorker broke the story in which Ramirez said Kavanaugh exposed his genitals to her at a party on Yale’s Old Campus. A mutual friend told Berchem that Kavanaugh asked her to go on the record in his defense.
On Sept. 22, before Ramirez’s allegations became public, an unidentified female texted Berchem saying she had to send information to “Brett’s team,” the Citizen reported. The photograph to be sent, according to the texts, was also likely to be sent to the New York Times and Ronan Farrow of the New Yorker. In a text the next day, the same woman said she had received a call from “Brett’s guy.”
A short while later, as rumors spread that the New Yorker was going to publish Ramirez’s claims, the unidentified female told Berchem,
“Brett asked me to go on the record and now New Yorker are not answering phones!”
When reached for comment by Hearst Connecticut Media on Tuesday, Berchem said she was unable to go on the record or comment on the memo she sent to the FBI.
Berchem’s efforts to forward her information to the FBI have not been welcome by the Judiciary Committee’s majority Republicans, NBC reported.
“We heard from Kerry late on Thursday and submitted her summary to the Judiciary Committee early Friday,” a spokeswoman for U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said in a statement. Blumenthal sits on the Judiciary Committee.
“After we were made to jump through several hoops that delayed our moving forward, it became clear that the majority Committee staff had not turned this summary over to the FBI and, in fact, had no intention of turning it over to the FBI. With our assistance, Kerry submitted her summary to the FBI herself,” Blumenthal’s statement said.
According to NBC, a spokesman for committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said “the texts from Ms. Berchem do not appear relevant or contradictory to Judge Kavanaugh’s testimony.”
Kavanaugh, a federal appeals judge on the District of Columbia Circuit bench, has denied that he exposed himself to Ramirez when they were freshmen at Yale or that he sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford when they were in high school. The FBI is investigating Ford’s allegations following the heated Judiciary Committee hearing.
Kavanaugh, a junior at Yale on Sept. 26, 1985, was questioned about the incident but not arrested. The report states that Christen Dudley threw a glass at Dom Cozzolino, cutting his ear. The handwritten report, which was recovered from microfiche records, notes that Dudley was arrested (indicated by an “A” next to his name), according to New Haven police spokesman Officer David Hartman, but there is no charge listed and Hartman said he had no information about how the case was disposed of. He said it would have been a simple assault.
Dudley’s lawyer, Mark Sherman of Stamford, issued a statement Tuesday saying, “To be clear, after investigation, Chris Dudley was never arrested by Yale or New Haven police, was never charged with a crime, and never set foot in court.” Sherman said Dudley, a former basketball player for Yale who played for five NBA teams between 1987 and 2003 and ran an unsuccessful run for governor of Oregon in 2010, according to CNN and basketball-reference.com, lives in California and is not speaking to the press.
There is no mention in the police report of any of the men drinking alcohol at the bar. Connecticut’s drinking age had risen from 20 to 21 on Sept. 1, 1985, according to an archived New York Times article. Congress had passed a law requiring states to raise their legal drinking age to 21. Connecticut stood to lose $22 million in highway funds. According to a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration report, “Connecticut changed from age 18 to 19 in 1982, from 19 to 20 in 1983 and then to age 21 in 1985.” Connecticut lowered its drinking age from 21 to 18 in 1972.
According to the New Haven police report, when officers arrived, “Mr. Cozzolino was bleeding from the right ear. He also stated that he was in a verbal altercation with an unknown male (five men are listed on the report). “The argument between the two heated up when Mr. Cozzolino stated that Mr. Kavanaugh threw ice at him for some unknown reason. And he then got hit in the ear with a glass.”
The report continues, Frank Guido “stated that he seen Mr. Cozzolino arguing with a gentleman and saw a tall gentleman (later identified as Mr. Dudley) throw a tall glass (Collins glass) and hit Mr. Cozzolino in the ear. Another man, Joe Devlin, “stated that he also saw Dudley (the tall gentleman) throw the glass and hit Mr. Cozzolino in the ear,” according to the report.
“Mr. Dudley stated that he didn’t do it and Mr. Kavanaugh didn’t (unintelligible) to say if he threw the ice or not,” the report states.
Hartman said if the parties “agreed that they were wrong and it hadn’t impacted others, then this could have been dismissed.” The officer who wrote the report, Nathaniel Blackman, has been retired for more than 20 years, Hartman said.
“The court has no record that we’re aware of of the disposition of this case,” Hartman said. “No one made a complaint against Kavanaugh.”
Hartman said police are called to downtown bars for such incidents “all the time.” “We’re a college town. We’re a college town with a lot of bars. We have 90-plus bars in the downtown area alone,” he said.
Demery’s, at 1 Broadway at the corner of York Street, has long been closed. According to a Nov. 10, 2017, article on thepolitic.org, Demery’s was a pizzeria during the day and a bar at night, beginning in the 1980s. According to the article, Yale bought the property in 1984 and leased it to Au Bon Pain. That store closed on May 27, 2013, according to a New Haven Register story, and later replaced by Kiko Milano, an Italian cosmetics brand, and Emporium DNA 2050, a high-end retailer, which later closed.
For a while, the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History occupied the space as a satellite exhibit. It has been occupied since Aug. 31, 2017, by Patagonia, according to an employee.
On the 1985 police report, there are three offices and a detective listed, in addition to Blackman. Hartman said the detective could have been working on patrol at the time.