David McNew/Getty Images Opinion Avenatti 2020

Rich Lowry is editor of National Review and a contributing editor with Politico Magazine.





Michael Avenatti is the lawyer for our times.

In an age of vertiginous news cycles, of nonexistent standards, of social-media trash-talkers and braggarts, it’s no wonder that cable news has belched forth an attorney whose main qualification is making charges that get him more attention.


Avenatti hit pay dirt initially with Stormy Daniels, the porn star who allegedly had an affair with Donald Trump and got paid for her silence. The payment was handled by Trump’s fixer, Michael Cohen, and provided endless fodder for cable segments, as Cohen came under federal investigation and eventually pled guilty to crimes, including involving the payment.

This was a real nice ride, but how was a cable-addicted attorney who enjoyed being knee-deep in a sleazy story transfixing the media to keep the hits coming? Well, he could run for president, which he is considering, but the Iowa caucuses aren’t for another 16 months. He jumped into the border crisis, but the news interest in that faded quickly.

How about coming up with the single most implausible and lurid allegation in the already incredibly tawdry Brett Kavanaugh confirmation battle? That’s a challenge that suits Avenatti perfectly. He hasn’t disappointed.

The past few days, Kavanaugh’s opponents haven’t been able to decide whether he’s guilty of teenage drinking and occasionally loutish behavior (plausible enough) or guilty of crimes for which he deserves jail time. Avenatti, never one for subtlety, of course opts for the latter.

His client, Julie Swetnick, says she routinely attended parties with Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge in 1981-82. She claims to have witnessed Kavanaugh and Judge drugging girls or getting them drunk “so they could then be ‘gang raped’ in a side room or bedroom by a ‘train’ of numerous boys.” According to Swetnick, she has “a firm recollection of seeing boys lined up outside rooms at these parties waiting for their ‘turn’ with a girl inside the room.”

This doesn’t make sense on many levels. Even in 1982, gang rape was a serious crime. It seems hard to believe that it would happen out in the open — boys lining up to do it during a party — with no one apparently bothering to report it to the police.

By Swetnick’s account, this horrific crime didn’t happen once. It was routine, taking place at “many of these parties.” And bizarrely, given that she witnessed these disgusting assaults and knew exactly how they came about (Kavanaugh and Judge spiking the punch), she kept attending the parties, although she made sure to avoid the punch.

Swetnick says she herself was gang-raped. If this is true, she obviously deserves our deepest sympathy and the perpetrators should be brought to justice, if at all possible at this late date. She doesn’t name who she believes the perpetrators are but does say that Kavanaugh was “present.”

What does that mean? She doesn’t say, and Avenatti, although he must know, won’t comment. Pressed on that point by Jake Tapper of CNN, he declared, “I’m not going to have any further comment on that specific allegation.” Clearly, he’s fine with people making the presumption that Kavanaugh is being accused, without directly making the accusation.

Notably, there are no witnesses to these terrible crimes, even though reporters have been combing through every person who knew Kavanaugh when he was in high school or college. For horrors like these to be perpetrated by groups of drunken young men in plain sight of others, and yet for everyone who attended these parties to keep quiet for decades — men and women, Republicans and Democrats — beggars belief.

But opponents of Kavanaugh don’t need plausibility. They just need yet another allegation. They don’t need proof. They just need delay, to allow time for potential additional accusations and stall whatever momentum the Kavanaugh confirmation has at this point. They don’t need a modicum of decency. They just need a drive to destroy Kavanaugh’s reputation by any means possible.

In other words, they need Michael Avenatti. After he unleashed the accusation, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Judiciary Committee Democrats called for Kavanaugh to drop out. The lawyer has met his moment, and his interests merged with a party happy to join him in the gutter.

Avenatti 2020.

