The phrase “he said, she said” is often used to characterize the opaqueness of a sex crime: Without a direct witness, someone must be lying. But who? Is it equally likely that the accuser and the accused will lie? Conservatives don’t think so. Kavanaugh, as Thomas did, has categorically denied all charges, and his supporters have characterized Blasey as the agent of a smear campaign orchestrated to keep Kavanaugh off the court.

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But Blasey’s story resonates with feminists and, in a change from 1991, with male Democratic senators — some of whom are former prosecutors shaped by the legal world that feminists made. Blasey’s supporters are strongly implying that Kavanaugh is lying and that Republicans are determined to keep Blasey — and possibly a second and a third accuser — from disproving these lies.

That so many people are focused on the question of lying instead of the underlying acts is the result of a fairly recent historical development. Lying has, of course, been a staple of American public life for centuries. But the exposure of lies, especially when those lies intersected with politicians’ dissolute private lives, became a staple of the new political journalism that emerged from the ashes of Watergate in 1974.

By 1987, Gary Hart would be forced out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination amid charges not just that he was a womanizer, but as importantly, that he was lying to the public about it. (According to journalist Matt Bai, who published a book about this episode in 2014, Hart has never said that his relationships with women were sexual affairs.)

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Perhaps the first real victim of what Bill Clinton’s staffers would dub “bimbo eruptions” five years later, Hart was shocked and stunned at a turn of events that would be unremarkable 10 years later. After all, male politicians — and most people holding elected office were still men — had long enjoyed the privilege of a press that treated sexual acts, licit and illicit, legal and illegal, as private matters. Hart was firm in his assertions that the public was not entitled to invade, or discuss, his private life or the state of his marriage. By all reputation an enthusiastic participant in the sexual revolution, Hart was no different from many married men on Capitol Hill.

But as Bai notes, the world of journalism had changed. After Watergate, every young political reporter aspired to be a Bob Woodward or a Carl Bernstein, and there had become “no greater calling than to expose the lies of a politician, no matter how inconsequential those lies might be or in how dark a place they might be lurking.” Indeed, when journalists at the Miami Herald broke the story about Hart, there was no consensus about why Hart’s sex life actually mattered. But they were clear that the lies did.

On the surface, this might seem disingenuous, but in fact, the ’80s were a kind of breakthrough for legitimizing sexual histories that had previously been taboo in politics. Being truthful began to matter more than outdated sexual mores. In 1980, Ronald Reagan became the first divorced president; in 1983, Gerry Studds (D-Mass.) was censured by the House for having an affair with a 17-year-old male page but kept his seat, becoming the first openly gay congressman, and in 1989, Barney Frank voluntarily submitted to a House investigation of his own relationship with a former male escort, overcoming an effort to expel him from the House and keeping his seat until his retirement in 2013.

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Journalists were supported in their zeal for truth-telling by an increasingly open media environment. In 1987, the year of the Hart scandal, the New York Times style manual officially ended its 12-year prohibition on the use of the word gay as a synonym for “homosexual.” As importantly, the 1980s also saw the rise of evening soap operas such as “Dallas,” “Falcon Crest” and “Dynasty,” all of which depicted worlds of wealthy and powerful people whose recreational bed-hopping made sex on television commonplace.

The destruction of Hart’s candidacy and the appetite of Americans for televised scandal set the stage for the Hill-Thomas hearings in a way that a decade of conversation about sexual harassment, a word that had entered the law in 1979, had not. And yet the question of whether Thomas had, as Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson put it, a “Rabelasian” sensibility that Hill was turning to political purposes was inseparable from whether he was lying about what had occurred.

Patterson speculated that Thomas probably had said and done the things that Hill had described — and that he had lied about it. In an op-ed in the New York Times, Patterson defended those alleged lies. “Judge Thomas was justified in denying making the remarks,” he wrote, “even if he had in fact made them, not only because the deliberate displacement of his remarks made them something else but on the utilitarian moral grounds that any admission would have immediately incurred a self-destructive and grossly unfair punishment.”

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In hindsight, it seems fairly clear that Thomas’s supporters — two of whom, Sens. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) and Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), are still on the Judiciary Committee — knew that he had sexually harassed Anita Hill and other women. Journalist David Brock, who famously characterized Hill as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty” during the hearings, later admitted that he had not only lied about Hill as part of a coordinated effort to protect Thomas but that he had helped Thomas to silence another potential accuser.

As the accusations against Kavanaugh pile up, it seems likely that some, if not all, Senate Republicans and President Trump, suspect — or even know — that Kavanaugh has done what his accusers say he has done. And it seems clear that many Republicans are embracing Patterson’s approach, arguing that even if Kavanaugh is lying about his dissolute youth, who can blame him given how disproportionate the punishment would be over a crime from decades ago?

Republicans are still determined to push the Kavanaugh nomination through, despite the fact that a growing number of journalists and attorneys are dedicating themselves to finding evidence to support Blasey’s claims. The question is whether any potential victory will be worth the cost. Kavanaugh may end up on the Court, but he’ll be tainted and delegitimized in the eyes of millions of Americans. Is that how Brett Kavanaugh wants to go down in history?