If this was the bombshell, where is the fuse?

A second woman has come forward to accuse Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault. Her name is Deborah Ramirez and the alleged incident happened at Yale during a night of heavy drinking as recounted in a salacious story written by Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer, published in the New Yorker.

It allegedly happened during a drinking game their freshman year. Ramirez told Farrow that the group forced her to drink repeatedly, that she quickly became intoxicated, and that:



A third male student then exposed himself to her. ‘I remember a penis being in front of my face,’ she said. ‘I knew that's not what I wanted, even in that state of mind.’ She recalled remarking, ‘That’s not a real penis,’ and the other students laughing at her confusion and taunting her, one encouraging her to ‘kiss it.’ She said that she pushed the person away, touching it in the process.



The person was allegedly Kavanaugh, and the account sounds disgusting and damning all at once.

Story continues below

Except it isn’t. This is another unconfirmed accusation, like the one brought by Christine Ford who accuses Kavanaugh of trying to rape her more than three decades ago during a similar night of allegedly heavy drinking. And like that story, there isn’t a single witness to confirm Kavanaugh’s supposed bad behavior.

Farrow even admits this, albeit in the tenth paragraph of a story already rocketing its way around social media and beltway listservs threatening to capsize the Kavanaugh nomination:



The New Yorker has not confirmed with other eyewitnesses that Kavanaugh was present at the party. The magazine contacted several dozen classmates of Ramirez and Kavanaugh regarding the incident. Many did not respond to interview requests



The closest thing to confirmation comes from one person, a fellow classmate who asked to remain anonymous. That classmate told Farrow he merely heard about the party, either that night or the day after. That classmate said they were “one hundred percent sure” they heard that Kavanaugh was the offender -- but that student was not at the alleged party.

[Related: Trump dismisses allegations against Brett Kavanaugh as 'totally political']

In other words, the anonymous student is repeating a rumor. Some students say it sounds like the sort of thing that could happen. Apparently, Kavanaugh drank like a fish at the time. Others who interviewed by Farrow, however, say the incident never even happened in the first place.

Two of the male students who Ramirez named insist that nothing happened. The wife of a third male student who was allegedly in the room also said nothing happened. Just for good measure, three more undergraduate classmates who spent time in the dormitory in question swear to his character. They write in a statement:



We were the people closest to Brett Kavanaugh during his first year at Yale. He was a roommate to some of us, and we spent a great deal of time with him, including in the dorm where this incident allegedly took place. Some of us were also friends with Debbie Ramirez during and after her time at Yale. We can say with confidence that if the incident Debbie alleges ever occurred, we would have seen or heard about it—and we did not.



But the nail in the coffin seems to come from the wife of the third man allegedly in the room. A close friend of Ramirez at the time, she tells Farrow that the accuser is “a woman I was best friends with. We shared intimate details of our lives. And I was never told this story by her, or by anyone else. It never came up. I didn’t see it; I never heard of it happening.”

Some will read those quotes and condemn Farrow for publishing a thin story. But the journalist who brought down the likes of Harvey Weinstein over his sexual deviance has done his homework, and that is why the arithmetic is worth laying out.

Six Yale undergraduates, close friends of Kavanaugh all of them and one best friend of Ramirez, say nothing happened. The story is salacious and horrifying. At this point though, and as Farrow takes care to note, it is just a story. It would be a bombshell except that, absent a witness who can place Kavanaugh in that room all those years ago, no one can light the fuse.