Judge Brett Kavanaugh characterization of his drinking habits during the confirmation hearings have come under scrutiny. Win McNamee/Getty Images

Brett Kavanaugh’s drinking habits in high school and college have been called into question, fundamentally because they could mean he engaged in behavior while drunk that he did not and does not recall, such as a sexual assault. But also because Kavanaugh, under oath, appears to have grievously misrepresented the nature of his drinking that gets at general credibility issues for the potential Supreme Court justice. To the growing corpus of unflattering anecdotes about Kavanaugh’s drinking comes a New York Times report Monday that Kavanaugh was involved in a late night barroom melee at Yale that led to the then-junior being questioned by the New Haven Police Department over what the police report described as “an assault.”


The incident dates back to September 1985 at the New Haven bar Demery’s. The police report filed at the time said that a 21-year-old man at the bar accused Kavanaugh of throwing ice on him “for some unknown reason.” Chad Ludington, a classmate of Kavanaugh who has recently refuted the judge’s characterization of his drinking habits, was with Kavanaugh the night of the altercation, as was Yale basketball player and future NBA journeyman Chris Dudley.

From the Times:

[Ludington] said that the altercation happened after a UB40 concert on Sept. 25, when he and a group of people went to Demery’s and were drinking pints. At one point, they were sitting near a man who, they thought, resembled Ali Campbell, the lead singer of UB40. “We’re trying to figure out if it’s him,” he said. When the man noticed Mr. Ludington, Mr. Kavanaugh and the others looking at him, he objected and told them to stop it, adding an expletive, Mr. Ludington said. Mr. Kavanaugh cursed, he said, and then “threw his beer at the guy.” “The guy swung at Brett,” Mr. Ludington continued. At that point, Mr. Dudley “took his beer and smashed it into the head of the guy, who by now had Brett in an embrace. I then tried to pull Chris back, and a bunch of other guys tried to pull the other guy back. I don’t know what Brett was doing in the melee, but there was blood, there was glass, there was beer and there was some shouting, and the police showed up.”

Chris Dudley denied hitting the man in the face with a glass, who was later treated at the hospital for “bleeding from the right ear,” and Kavanaugh did not want “to say if he threw the ice or not,” the police report said.