Re: Brett Kavanaugh

Director Doug Liman says his self-funded Brett Kavanaugh documentary Justice, which premiered at Sundance Friday night, might be far from finished as new tips started pouring within a half hour of the highly-secretive project being announced on Thursday.

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“The machinery that’s put into place against anyone that speaks up… we knew that machinery would be turned on us,” Liman said. “The film wouldn’t have been shown at Sundance, there would have been an injunction” had word of it leaked in advance.

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The film follows up tips the FBI apparently ignored in an investigation launched after Dr. Christine Blasey Ford accused Kavanaugh of assaulting her during a party in 1982 when they were both high school students in Maryland.

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Blasey Ford appears briefly in the opening few minutes of the film. Excerpts from her dramatic testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee serve to tell her story. Liman said he did not include a new on-camera interview with Blasey Ford because “she did her part. She more than did her part for this country. She’s done enough for 10 lifetimes.”

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Justice premiered in an overflowing theater to enthusiastic response. The documentary had been kept under close wraps and was only announced as part of the lineup at the opening news conference a day earlier.

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In a statement released after the festival announced the premiere of the documentary, Liman said, “It shouldn’t be this hard to have an open and honest conversation about whether or not a Justice on the Supreme Court assaulted numerous women as a young man. Thanks to this fantastic investigative team and the brave souls who trusted us with their stories, Justice picks up where the FBI investigation into Brett Kavanaugh fell woefully short. The film examines our judicial process and the institutions behind it, highlighting bureaucratic missteps and political powergrabs that continue to have an outsized impact on our nation today.”

  Deadline

Impeach Brett Kavanaugh.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 01/27/2023:  Why Kavanaugh won't be removed.

The reason the federal Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability, which had been tasked with investigating the allegations against Kavanaugh in 2018, stopped its probe in 2019, after he was sworn in at the Supreme Court, was because it no longer had any jurisdiction to examine his conduct. It had no authority to investigate a sitting justice, and so this machinery also ground to a halt. Another tip line to nowhere.

All of which means that the Liman film, and whatever resultant probe it generates, actually only replicates the problem faced by Ford back in 2018, and by Anita Hill and the other Clarence Thomas accusers back in 1991: No matter how much evidence you amass, no matter how many tips you investigate, no matter how many people eventually turn up to corroborate your story, there is nobody to call. There is no entity in existence to properly evaluate the claims, and there is no instrument to test them and to bring about accountability. Liman’s rolling tip line may indeed be a welcome move to correct the factual record and to amp up a cultural conversation about judicial behavior, and that is not a trivial intervention. But what it cannot be—because we haven’t yet built such a thing—is a formal political or legal engine for actual change in the judicial appointment system, or to the judiciary.

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And once again, without actual rules and enforceable systems of accountability, it will be yet another reminder that the women who are abused have no power, and that once the justices are seated, their relative power is boundless.

  Dahlia Lithwick @ Slate