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14 Reasons Why Avenatti’s Explosive Claims Don’t Add Up

The publicity-hungry attorney is making an explosive charge that Brett Kavanaugh is a serial rapist
By Grabien Staff

Celebrity TV attorney Michael Avenatti has dropped a bomb into Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination process. On Wednesday, the Stormy Daniels attorney announced he had a new client, Julie Swetnick, who prepared a statement recounting various allegations against Kavanaugh.

The most serious are that Kavanaugh, along with his high school friend Mark Judge, held a series of parties in high school during which they groped women, made degrading comments about women, drugged women, raped women, and even -- most egregiously -- arranged "gang rapes" of women. 

The story immediately received wall-to-wall media coverage, and Avenatti spent Wednesday bouncing from one TV interview to another. Coming after two earlier accusations against Kavanaugh, Democrats are using this latest accusation to present a picture of a candidate plagued with accusations of sexual assault. 

But how accurate are Avenatti's claims? 

Based on the evidence available thus far, there are many serious reasons to doubt their veracity. 

Here are 14 reasons this story doesn't seem to add up:

14. Despite, by her own account, being party to several gang rapes, she never pursued any kind of legal action. Some might think she's just the type to involve the authorities. But those people would be mistaken. A review of Maryland's Judiciary Case Search database shows that Swetnick sued a podiatrist named Stanley Spud for repeated phone calls. (It's case number 00703393D5 if you'd like to review the records.) The case was withdrawn, but she was not done suing. She also sued her former employer, New York Life Insurance Co., over a sexual harassment claim. She reached a financial settlement with the firm, the Wall Street Journal reports.

13. Swetnick also appears to be suffering financial problems. She's been sued twice for nonpayment; once by a hospital, and once by the state of Maryland over non payment of $62,000 in taxes. The former case she settled, the latter resulted in a lien. She's also attempted suing others, including a case against the WMATA as well as a housing developer (the case listed local government agencies as co-defendants). “Swetnick was on the other side of a civil case in 1994, as a plaintiff, when she filed a personal injury lawsuit in Maryland against the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority," the AP reported. "She claimed she lost more than $420,000 in earnings after she hurt her nose in a fall on a train in 1992. Swetnick, who described herself in court records as a model and actor, claimed she had “numerous modeling commitments” with several companies at the time of the accident but missed out them because of her injuries.”

“To support her claim for lost wages, Swetnick named ‘Konam Studios’ as one of the companies promising to employ her. A court filing identified Nam Ko, a representative of ‘Kunam Studios,’ as a possible plaintiff’s witness for her case.  Ko, however, told AP on Friday that he was just a friend of Swetnick’s and that he had never owned a company with a name spelled either way and had never agreed to pay her money for any work before she injured her nose. He said he first met Swetnick at a bar more than a year after her alleged accident."

“‘I didn’t have any money back then. I (was) broke as can be,’ Ko said.  Ko said he has a hazy memory of Swetnick asking to use him as a ‘character reference’ but doesn’t recall hearing about her lawsuit. ‘I thought it was for a job application,’ he said.”

She lost both cases. The Wall Street Journal reports the IRS also filed a lien against her in 2017 for $40,000 in unpaid taxes. 

With this as background, perhaps an enterprising reporter should ask her attorney whether she's been promised payment in exchange for her participation. We've reached out to Avenatti for comment and will update this post should we receive a response. 

12. In other legal woes for Swetnick, her former boyfriend, Richard Vinneccy, had to file a restraining order against her. He said she became enraged after he broke things off, even threatening his future wife and their daughter. 

“Right after I broke up with her, she was threatening my family, threatening my wife and threatening to do harm to my baby at that time,” Vinneccy told POLITICO. "I know a lot about her.”

"She’s not credible at all,” he said. “Not at all.” Even worse for Avenatti, her former boyfriend says he has "a lot of facts, evidence, that was she's saying [about Kavanaugh] is not true at all." 

11. Swetnick has run into other legal trouble. In 2000, she was sued by her former employer, Webtrends Corp., for defamation and fraud. Worse, she was accused of sexual harassment. The Oregonian reported: "The suit also alleges Swetnick ‘engaged in unwelcome, sexually offensive conduct’ while at Webtrends and ‘made false and retaliatory allegations that other co-workers had engaged in inappropriate conduct toward her.’  The suit alleges Swetnick ‘engaged in unwelcome sexual innuendo and inappropriate conduct’ directed at two male employees during a business lunch, with Webtrends customers present." She was later found to have provided false information on her employment application. 

10. Swetnick, in her case against her former employer, retained the legal services of Debra Katz, the Democratic operative who is also representing Christine Ford. This could be a coincidence, but it's a coincidence worth noting. 

9. Avenatti's claims over the last week about this client and her claims have vacillated. Earlier, in letters to the Senate Judiciary Committee, he suggested Kavanaugh gang-raped his client. Yet when he was interviewed after the client was announced, he backed away from claiming Kavanaugh himself raped his client. 

8. In Montgomery County, Md., there is no statue of limitations on rape. If the case against Kavanaugh is as air-tight as Avenatti insists, it would have made sense to go directly to police, as a police report would help corroborate the allegations. He didn't do that. When asked on CNN why not, he ducked, and said he might at some point down the road.

7. Typically Avenatti takes his cases straight to the press. In this instance, he went straight to Twitter. If he has witnesses, as he claims, who corroborate Swetnick's allegations, it would have made this initial presentation much more persuasive. Why is he hiding them, assuming they do in fact exist? Why keep his client hidden? These aren't typical Avenatti tactics.

There are only two possible explanations: They don't exist, or, his focus isn't proving her allegation, but rather disrupting Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation proceeding. 

6. As Charles Cooke points out, Avenatti surfaced no new facts about Kavanaugh in Swetnick's statement. Had she brought something new to the fore, that would have helped bolster her case. Instead, her allegation makes reference to "Beach Week," something that just entered the news cycle thanks to Kavanaugh releasing his calendar from 1982. 

5. In the statement, Swetnick says she is aware Brett Kavanaugh and Mark Judge arranged for unsuspecting women to be gang raped at parties. "I also witnessed efforts by Mark Judge, Brett Kavanaugh, and others to cause girls to become inebriated and disoriented so they could then be "gang raped" in a side room or bedroom by a 'train; of numerous boys. I have a firm recollection of seeing boys lined up outside rooms at many of these parties waiting for their 'turn' with a girl inside the room. These boys included Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh." 

Swetnick states she attended at least 10 such parties. Avenatti, appearing on CNN, was asked why his client kept returning to parties where women were being gang raped. Avenatti contradicts his client's statement, saying she actually didn't know what was going on in these "back rooms." 

4. Swetnick graduated high school in 1980. She says these rapes occurred at parties in 1982, when Kavanaugh was 17 (when she was at least a sophomore in college). Of course, it's possible for a college student to attend high school parties being thrown by underclassmen, but it's certainly unusual, especially when the parties are infamous for gang rape. 

3. Despite being witness, and an alleged victim of, drugging/date rape/gang rape, Swetnick kept these monstrous crimes to herself. She did not report the accusations to authorities at the time (instead, she kept attending these parties); she didn't report them to anyone ... until 37 years later. She notably also didn't think this merited bringing to the public's attention when Kavanaugh was named to any number of earlier federal positions (he's been in the public spotlight for almost 30 years), nor when he was first named as a possible Supreme Court nominee, nor when he was named a Supreme Court nominee, nor even during his nomination hearings. She only thought to bring this up after the hearings concluded, about two days before his nomination was set to be voted on. And once the decision was made to move forward, she brought her case to ... celebrity TV attorney Michael Avenatti? Why not an attorney known for their work on behalf of sex crimes victims? Or an influential media outlet? 

2. As with Kavanaugh's first two accusers, there is no actual evidence or corroboration outside of the accuser's account. There is no police report, no physical evidence, no contemporaneous witness statements. A series of gang rapes would produce an incredible number of victims, witnesses, and evidence. But somehow Avenatti wasn't able to bring any to the table alongside his accusation. 

1. Kavanaugh has had no fewer than six FBI background checks. These extensive reviews typically locate individuals from every year of the subject's life. Assuming the FBI is half as competent as Senate Democrats currently portray them as, it's hard to imagine the agents would completely fail to turn up anything related to something as major as serial gang rape/drugging.

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