“He would come home and he was incoherent, stumbling, he would sometimes be singing, he occasionally would wear this — I think it was an old leather football helmet — and he would throw up, and then in the morning would have a lot of trouble getting out of bed.” This is the Brett Kavanaugh his former college roommate, James Roche recalls. Roche made claims in an op-ed for Slate and cleared up a lot of the “lies” he says Kavanaugh made during the recent Senate hearing.
In the editorial, Roche wrote, “Brett Kavanaugh stood up under oath and lied about his drinking and about the meaning of words in his yearbook. He did so baldly, without hesitation or reservation. In his words and his behavior, Judge Kavanaugh has shown contempt for the truth, for the process, for the rule of law, and for accountability. His willingness to lie to avoid embarrassment throws doubt on his denials about the larger questions of sexual assault.”
Kavanaugh testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that he has never been “blackout drunk”. However in a separate interview, Roche told CNN, “I saw him both what I would consider blackout drunk and also dealing with the repercussions of that in the morning.”⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
During Roche’s appearance on “Anderson Cooper 360”,
he said he was “shocked” when he heard Kavanaugh incorrectly define “boofing” and “Devil’s Triangle” “because those words were commonly used and they were references to sexual activities. I heard them talking about it regularly. I think that contributed to some of my feelings about the fact that these guys treated women in a way that I didn’t like.” He continued by saying, “We were in a room together — our beds were 10 feet apart for a couple of months. And what struck me and made me more interested in speaking out about it is not only did I know that he wasn’t telling, you know, the truth, I knew that he knew that he wasn’t telling the truth.”⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Roche said he is not one to judge Kavanaugh for his actions but he is also not portraying to be innocent when he knows he’s not, like Kavanaugh is doing. “I was not a choirboy, but—unlike Brett—I’m not going on national television and testifying under oath that I was.”
“In Brett’s cases, if he is innocent, he should be cleared,” Roche writes in the Slate editorial. “If he is not and he is being untruthful to the nation, that should disqualify him from sitting on the highest court in the land. This just seems fair.”
