Guess who wrote the following:

"New Year's Eve 1984 I will never forget. I was 15. As the ball dropped, I leaned over to hug a friend and she met me instead with an overwhelming kiss. As we fumbled upon the bed, I remember debating my next 'move' as if it were a chess game. With the 'Top Gun' slogan ringing in my head, I slowly reached for her breast. After having my hand pushed away once, I reached my 'mark.'

"Our groping ended soon and while no 'relationship' ensued, a friendship did. You see, the next week in school she told me that she was drunk that night and didn't really know what she was doing."

Give up?

It was none other than our junior U.S. Senator, Cory "Spartacus" Booker, in 1992. He was a student at Stanford University at the time and wrote occasional pieces for the Stanford Daily. This one was headlined "So much for stealing second."

It's been circulating in conservative circles since 2013, when the Daily Caller ran a piece about it. Many conservatives have accused the senator of sexual assault.

That's nonsense, of course. The sort of behavior Booker recounted was common in the 1980s and early 1990s.

It's different these days. Colleges now require consent. Stanford bans "unwanted sexual advances." But it also bans "requests for sexual favors."

Good luck figuring that out.

But that column puts the senator in an awkward position regarding the allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh by psychologist Christine Blasey Ford.

"It takes enormous courage to come forward publicly as Ms. Ford has," Booker said the other day. "The Senate owes it to her and every survivor of sexual trauma to listen to her story and gather all of the facts before moving forward with this nomination."

Ford had 35 years to make her allegations against Kavanaugh. Yet she didn't bring them up privately until she went to therapy in 2012.

She didn't bring them up publicly until she sent a letter to her Congresswoman that got to California Senator Dianne Feinstein in late July.

That would have been the appropriate time to start that inquiry. But the Democrats waited until hearings were almost over.

I'm skeptical of all such assertions. Around the same time Booker wrote that piece, I was doing a magazine piece on Satanism, which was being blown out of proportion in the media. People all over America were being charged with sexual molestations based on so-called "recovered memory" that surfaced in therapy.

The worst such case was the "Wenatchee Witch Hunt" in Washington State in which 18 people were jailed over recovered-memory allegations that were later discredited.

Memory is just not that reliable. And that includes Booker's memory.

Maybe the kids in Harrington Park were a lot more advanced than the kids I went to high school with in Toms River. But I find it hard to imagine a bunch of high-schoolers going to a New Year's Eve party at which beds were placed near the TV.

Where were the parents? I asked Booker's people if they could tell me. I also wanted to know what the quote was from "Top Gun." That movie didn't come out until 1986. I got no reply.

But this sure sounds a lot like Booker's tales of a drug addict named "T-Bone" he befriended before becoming mayor of Newark.

When Booker first ran for Senate in 2013, Slate reported that the story was challenged by a number of Newarkers, including Rutgers history professor Clement Price. Price said that "Booker conceded to him in 2008 that T-Bone was a 'composite' of several people he'd met while living in Newark."

Booker himself told an Esquire Magazine writer that the character was "an archetype," one whose name "may not actually be T-Bone."

Every politician exaggerates, you might say. Give him the benefit of the doubt.

Okay. But based on that Stanford Daily column, Booker should be giving Kavanaugh the benefit of the doubt as well. The point of it was that the future senator had "a wake-up call" and decided "I will never be the same."

By all accounts Kavanaugh has had great relationships with women in the years since high school.

As to what happened in high school, I doubt it can be reconstructed at this late date. Nonetheless it is my fervent hopes that Ford goes before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday and gives her account.

Kavanaugh can give his account as well. Then Booker can question both of them.

He's clearly positioning himself as a contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. This would be a golden opportunity for him to advance his candidacy.

It's going to be a crowded field, however.

I wonder if he'll even make it to first base.

ADD: WHAT DID TOM CRUISE SAY AND WHEN DID HE SAY IT?

I'm sure that Booker's mistake concerning "Top Gun" was entirely innocent. But it certainly makes the point about how untrustworthy our memories are. We commonly change our memories to match our beliefs.

My high-school class is having a reunion this weekend. We've been emailing back and forth about various events that took place at St. Joseph's High School in the 1960s.

Almost everyone's memories are conflicting. That's common.

In Ford's case, she may sincerely believe her version of events from 35 years ago. But it seems likely there is no one - including her - who can recall exactly how the events unfolded.

And psychologists are particularly susceptible to this sort of thing. When I was writing about Satanism in the 1990s, I interviewed quite a few psychologists who were convinced that "repressed memories" were very common.

Back in the 1990s, a lot of people were jailed before the idea of repressed memories was debunked. The credit goes to The Wall Street Journal's Dorothy Rabinowitz, who dissected many of the worst cases. Here's a good piece on "The Myth of Repressed Memories" that should be required reading for every senator on that committee.

When it comes to this sort of thing, I suspect the only people easier to fool than psychologists are the editors of Rolling Stone.

But they're not on the Judiciary Committee.

Cory Booker is.