Kavanaugh: Saint or sinner? Don’t buy false dichotomy

Brett Kavanaugh’s wife, Ashley, told Martha MacCallum of Fox News: “I know Brett. I’ve known him for 17 years.” But that’s hardly his whole life. And that’s hardly the whole Brett. She knows him mainly as a husband and a father, moved by the emotions those roles stir up, distinguished by the traits they tease out.

“They know Brett,” she said of their two daughters. “And they know the truth.” They do indeed — part of it. But not all. He may be the gentlest man with them. He may be a feminist in terms of their ambitions, their basketball league.

But he may be nothing of the kind to women in the abstract or women who were in his path when he was very young, very inebriated and very insistent.

A Yale roommate of his told The New Yorker that Kavanaugh was “frequently, incoherently drunk” during the time in college when, their former classmate Deborah Ramirez alleges, he exposed himself to her.

“Is it believable that she was alone with a wolfy group of guys who thought it was funny to sexually torment a girl like Debbie?” the roommate, James Roche, said. “Yeah, definitely. Is it believable that Kavanaugh was one of them? Yes.”

As Brett Kavanaugh’s admirers and detractors stage a ferocious battle over his biography and reputation and those of us watching it try to determine what he’s capable of and what he’s made of, too many of us fall into a familiar trap.

He’s either a wrongly tarnished angel or deceptively phlegmatic devil, prey or predator, “a loyal friend or fratty enabler of bad behavior,” as Kyle Swenson wrote in The Washington Post. A man like Kavanaugh couldn’t do what he’s accused of, or a man like him indisputably did it.

His ethics are elastic and his lies abundant — about his actions in the second Bush administration, about his awareness of a mentor’s obsession with porn and mistreatment of women. Or he’s a primly religious, utterly devoted family man whose blemishes are the inventions and exaggerations of political foes. That’s a misleading, false dichotomy, inconsistent with all we know about human nature and ourselves.

In the interview that Kavanaugh and his wife gave to Fox News on Monday, he repeatedly mentioned the Sept. 14 letter that 65 women who knew him during high school signed and sent to the leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee. It vouched for positive interactions with and impressions of him.

But it doesn’t mean other women couldn’t have had negative ones. A person’s experience of Kavanaugh likely hinged on circumstances. Perhaps it was luck — or curse — of the draw.

Kavanaugh is being typecast, but he’s many types. He’s entitled. He’s diligent. He’s arrogant. He’s earnest. He’s the beer-mad treasurer of the “Keg City Club,” according to what he wrote in his 1983 yearbook from all-boys Georgetown Prep.

Speaking of that yearbook, The Times on Monday night published a story about a phrase Kavanaugh included on his page: “Renate Alumnius.” It was apparently an unsubstantiated boast, by him and other football players, about Renate Schroeder, who attended an all-girls Catholic school nearby.

Now known as Renate Dolphin, she was among the 65 women on that letter, and she learned only afterward about the yearbook phrase. “The insinuation is horrible, hurtful and simply untrue,” she said in a statement to The Times.

She knew one Kavanaugh in high school. She’s getting to know another in retrospect. She’s sifting conflicting signals. That’s the task before all of us now.