Yale roommate says Kavanaugh lied under oath about drinking and yearbook, How Trauma Affects Memory, More Believe Ford Than Kavanaugh, A Cultural Shift From 1991

-  Yale roommate says Kavanaugh lied under oath about drinking and yearbook

-  Kavanaugh's college roommate: He was lying (interview)

-  How Trauma Affects Memory: Scientists Weigh In On The Kavanaugh Hearing

-  Poll: More Believe Ford Than Kavanaugh, A Cultural Shift From 1991
 

Yale roommate says Kavanaugh lied under oath about drinking and yearbook
By Kate Sullivan, CNN Wed October 3, 2018

Washington (CNN)James Roche, one of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's freshman year roommates at Yale, said Wednesday that Kavanaugh lied under oath about his drinking and about the meaning of his yearbook entries.

In an op-ed for Slate, Roche writes, "Brett Kavanaugh stood up under oath and lied about his drinking and about the meaning of words in his yearbook. He did so baldly, without hesitation or reservation."

"In his words and his behavior, Judge Kavanaugh has shown contempt for the truth, for the process, for the rule of law, and for accountability," Roche added. "His willingness to lie to avoid embarrassment throws doubt on his denials about the larger questions of sexual assault."

Kavanaugh testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that he has never been blackout drunk. He was appearing before senators to answer an accusation from California professor Christine Blasey Ford that he sexually assaulted her when they were both in high school in the early 1980s. Kavanaugh denies the allegation and says he has no memory of the party where Ford says the incident happened.

Roche says he believes his friend Deborah Ramirez, who has accused Kavanaugh of exposing himself to her at a college dorm party.

He told CNN's Anderson Cooper on Wednesday night that "there is zero chance that she is making up this story."

Kavanaugh has denied Ramirez's allegation. CNN has reached out to the White House for reaction to Roche's comments.

Roche told CNN, "I saw him both what I would consider blackout drunk and also dealing with the repercussions of that in the morning."

"I didn't socialize with Brett," Roche said. "He would come home and he was incoherent, stumbling, he would sometimes be singing, he occasionally would wear this -- I think it was an old leather football helmet -- and he would throw up, and then in the morning would have a lot of trouble getting out of bed."....

Roche writes he does not know if Kavanaugh attacked Ford in high school or exposed himself to Ramirez in college, "But I can say that he lied under oath."

In Roche's appearance on "Anderson Cooper 360," he said he was "shocked" when he heard Kavanaugh say "boofing" meant flatulence and "Devil's Triangle" was a drinking game, "because those words were commonly used and they were references to sexual activities. ... I heard them talking about it regularly. I think that contributed to some of my feelings about the fact that these guys treated women in a way that I didn't like."

"We were in a room together -- our beds were 10 feet apart for a couple of months," Roche told Cooper. "And what struck me and made me more interested in speaking out about it is not only did I know that he wasn't telling, you know, the truth, I knew that he knew that he wasn't telling the truth."
Roche told CNN his memory of Kavanaugh is that "he was on the far edge of this -- he was notably heavier in his drinking than other people."....
https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/03/politics/yale-roommate-kavanaugh-cnntv/index.html

Kavanaugh's college roommate: He was lying
CNN Published on Oct 3, 2018
James Roche, the college roommate of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, speaks to CNN's Anderson Cooper about his experience with Kavanaugh at Yale.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQGrTMLYTCI

How Trauma Affects Memory: Scientists Weigh In On The Kavanaugh Hearing
September 28, 2018 Rhitu Chatterjee
In Thursday's testimony at Judge Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings, Christine Blasey Ford alleged Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a party in 1982, when she was 15 years old and he was 17.

Kavanaugh staunchly denied these allegations.

But memory is fallible. A question on many people's minds is, how well can anyone recall something that happened over 35 years ago?

Pretty well, say scientists, if the memory is of a traumatic event. That's because of the key role emotions play in making and storing memories.

On any given day, our brains store or "encode" only some of the things we experience. "What we pay attention to is what's more likely to get encoded," says Jim Hopper, a teaching associate in psychology at Harvard University and a consultant on sexual assault and trauma.

A region of the brain called the hippocampus plays an important role in this process. Ford referred to the hippocampus when questioned by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., about how she was so sure that Kavanaugh was the perpetrator of the alleged assault.

"The hippocampus certainly plays a role in taking things into short-term memory and then transferring them and consolidating them into long-term memories," says Hopper.

If an event elicits an emotional reaction in us, then it's more likely to make it into our memory. "Things that have more emotional significance tend to get more encoded," he says.

And when something elicits an intense negative emotion, like a trauma, it's even more likely to be encoded in the brain....

That's because a high-stress state "alters the function of the hippocampus and puts it into a super-encoding mode," says Hopper, especially early on during an event. And "the central details [of the event] get burned into their memory and they may never forget them."....

However, this doesn't mean that these memories include every detail of the event. The brain holds on to the most important stuff at the expense of the peripheral details....

Another factor that affects how memories are stored is alcohol use.

"Generally alcohol can make people forget things," says Mary Beth Miller, a clinical psychologist at the University of Missouri, Columbia who has studied the impact of alcohol consumption on making and retrieving memories.

Earlier this month, Ford told The Washington Post that she remembers Kavanaugh being "stumbling drunk" whereas she recalls having one beer that night.

Other accusers who did not testify Thursday have also suggested Kavanaugh was part of a group of friends who indulged in heavy drinking in the 1980s....
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/09/28/652524372/how-trauma-affects-memory-scientists-weigh-in-on-the-kavanaugh-hearing

Poll: More Believe Ford Than Kavanaugh, A Cultural Shift From 1991
October 3, 2018 Domenico Montanaro

After a day of wrenching testimony from Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford — who has accused him of sexual assault in high school — more Americans say they believe Ford's account over Kavanaugh's denials, according to an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll released Wednesday.

In choosing who is telling the truth, 45 percent said Ford is, up from 32 percent ahead of her Sept. 27 testimony. A third (33 percent) said Kavanaugh is the one telling the truth, up slightly from 26 percent before he testified but not as much of a rise as for Ford.

The daylong hearing appears to have been influential in helping people decide who was telling the truth. Before the hearing, 42 percent said they were unsure whom to believe. Now, just 22 percent are unsure.

The results represent a shift from 1991, when more people said they believed then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas over Anita Hill. Hill accused Thomas of sexual harassment in the workplace. A 1991 CBS/New York Times poll, also conducted days after their dramatic, televised Capitol Hill testimonies, found that 58 percent believed Thomas more, as opposed to just 24 percent who said Hill.

"If it remains 'he said, she said,' the benefit of the doubt is very different than 1991, and it goes to Ford not Kavanaugh," said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, which conducted the poll. "It shows the reaction to the testimony and does show an underlying change in attitude than 27 years ago."....

https://www.npr.org/2018/10/03/654054108/poll-more-believe-ford-than-kavanaugh-a-cultural-shift-from-1991