On the eve of last week’s dramatic Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, legislative staffers questioned him privately about an anonymous letter purportedly from an Oceanside woman saying Kavanaugh and a friend raped her.

The hand-written letter was sent to the downtown San Diego office of California Sen. Kamala Harris two weeks ago.

Staffers read the two-and-a-half page letter to Kavanaugh and questioned him about it at 8:07 p.m. Wednesday, according to a transcript of the telephone interview released on Monday.

The letter was signed “Jane Doe, Oceanside, California.”


According to the transcript of the 21-minute interview, Kavanaugh denied the allegation outright, insisting that he never sexually assaulted anyone in a car or elsewhere.

“The whole thing is ridiculous,” Kavanaugh told his interviewers. “Nothing ever -- anything like that, nothing. I mean that. The whole thing’s just a crock, farce, wrong, didn’t happen, not anything close!”

Monday’s release of the interview transcript shows the kinds of information that senators, attorneys and the nominee have been sorting through, some of it behind the scenes, as they assess Kavanaugh’s fitness for the highest court in the land.

The Oceanside letter is undated and offers few clues about where or when the alleged assault occurred.


“Kavanaugh kissed me forcefully. I told him I only wanted a ride home,” the author wrote. “Kavanaugh continued to grope me over my clothes, forcing his kisses on me and putting his hand under my sweater. ‘No,’ I yelled at him.”

The transcript makes reference to the Oceanside woman becoming the sixth allegation against Kavanaugh late in the proceedings.

The latest accuser said Kavanaugh continued to grope her despite her pleas for him to stop. At the same time, the boy in the back seat covered her mouth so she could not scream, she wrote.

According to the accuser, who said she is a teacher who was afraid to come forward because of the potential impact to her and her family, she had been attending a party with a friend who left with a different boy, leaving her to find her own way home. She acknowledged she had been drinking at the gathering.


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The letter, which was marked “urgent” across the envelope, concludes with an explanation for why the alleged rape was not reported. She said times were different at the time of the attack. She also said she has grown up to receive an education and start a family and a home.

“Just because something happens a long time ago, because a rape victim doesn’t want to personally come forward, does not mean something can’t be true,” she wrote.

Harris spokeswoman Lily Adams said the correspondence came with no return address.


“As soon as our office received the letter, we turned it over to the chairman’s office and to the FBI, which is the standard practice,” Adams said in a telephone interview late Monday.

At the end of the interview, the staffers said to Kavanaugh, “This call is not part of the FBI background investigation because we received these allegations outside of the FBI background investigation. But we want to just find out from you, do you object to the public release of what you have said today on this phone call, including the public release of the transcript?”

Kavanaugh replied, “I do not object.”


It is not clear whether the latest accusation will become part of the limited, reopened FBI investigation, launched after Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Arizona, requested it on Friday as a condition of his support for moving the nomination from the committee to the full Senate.