By Jackie Kamins

I went to Holton-Arms, a small all-girls high school, nine years after Christine Blasey Ford. I didn't fit in there. My parents grew up poor; I didn't have old money or designer clothes. I was short, awkward and brainy. I wasn't interested in -- or invited to -- the types of parties Dr. Ford describes. But my friends were.

I knew boys at Georgetown Prep, boys like Brett Kavanaugh. They fit in. They were the master class. You could tell just from the way they walked that it was going to work out for them. Whatever "it" was, they could have it.

I was never drunk and alone with boys like Brett Kavanaugh. But my friends were.

I don't have any particular information about Dr. Ford's allegations. But I heard many similar stories at Holton: sad stories, traumatic stories and, unfortunately, completely typical Monday morning stories. No one spoke up about it. What could you say about the master class? No one ever answered for any of it. As Kavanaugh put it himself in 2015, "What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep."

After law school, I also happened to clerk for a judge in the same building as Judge Alex Kozinski, Kavanaugh's former boss. Judge Kozinski was a brilliant, irreverent and incredibly inappropriate man. I didn't interact with him much, but enough to notice that he enjoyed getting a rise out of people by saying inappropriate things. At an office birthday party, for example, Kozinski delighted in showing pictures of kittens stuck in bottles to the clerks, who were awkwardly eating cake and feeling trapped. It was rare to have a conversation with him where he didn't say something inappropriate. When I learned he had been accused of saying sexually inappropriate things to female clerks, it did not surprise me.

Judge Kozinski was rumored to have his clerks sign a contract promising that they would be at work 12 to 14 hours a day, 365 days a year. Many of them lived in an apartment across the street from the courthouse. They were always there. Kozinski clerks had a front-row seat to his - as Judge Kozinski himself put it - "unusual sense of humor."

Kavanaugh's reaction to the news that more than a dozen women have accused Judge Kozinski of saying sexually inappropriate things? He testified under oath that he was "shocked." I know many people who worked for and around Judge Kozinski. I know none who were "shocked."

I have to wonder if Kavanaugh was shocked that it happened, or shocked that Kozinski had to answer for it. Where he and I grew up, no one answered for any of it.

-- Jacqueline Kamins is a government lawyer residing in Portland.

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