Kavanaugh does not remember whether he received inappropriate emails from now-disgraced judge
When I came forward in December about my experience in Judge Alex Kozinski’s chambers, I said that when he showed me pictures of naked people without my co-clerks present, I felt isolated. Had they been there, I explained, “it would have felt like I was being treated as one of the guys. Kozinski was not known for being terribly appropriate, but I could handle that. Inappropriateness directed solely at me felt very different than chambers-wide jokes.”
Those chamberswide jokes that I alluded to have now become an issue in Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. Kavanaugh clerked for Kozinski in the early 1990s and has maintained a close personal relationship with the judge. When Kavanaugh was nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2006, it was Kozinski who introduced him to the Senate.
For years, Kozinski maintained an email list known as the “Easy Rider Gag List,” to which he would send sexually explicit and otherwise raunchy jokes; the existence of the list was first publicized in 2008. In his hearings, Kavanaugh was asked by Sens. Orrin Hatch and Mazie Hirono if he was aware of the email list, and if he had received emails from Kozinski with sexually explicit content. In response to these questions, he said he couldn’t recall anything like that. And, in response to a written question for the record—“Has Judge Kozinski ever made comments about sexual matters to you, either in jest or otherwise?”—Kavanaugh responded, “I do not remember any such comments.”
This last response leaves me wondering whether Kavanaugh and I clerked for the same man. Kozinski’s sexual comments—to both men and women—were legendary. When I first arrived in chambers, the outgoing clerks suggested that we should watch The Aristocrats, a documentary about a notorious dirty joke, to prepare ourselves for the upcoming year. Kozinski’s email list had hundreds of participants, and some of the jokes he shared were incredibly off-color. Kozinski has repeatedly said in interviews that he learned to write from reading Playboy (see this NPR interview from 2004, one of multiple public venues where he has mentioned this.) And in his statement announcing his retirement, which he released after 15 women had come forward with allegations of sexual misconduct against him, he said that he “had a broad sense of humor and a candid way of speaking to both male and female law clerks alike.”
Kavanaugh’s relationship with Kozinski started as a judge-clerk relationship—a relationship that Kozinski describes as “the most intense and mutually dependent one outside of marriage, parenthood, or a love affair.” In that same article, which Kavanaugh has approvingly referenced, Kozinski states that “[j]udge and law clerk are tethered by an invisible cord for the rest of their mutual careers.” Over the years, that invisible cord has been short for Kozinski and Kavanaugh. They have sat on panels together and co-authored books. (In the hearings, Hatch asked Kavanaugh questions about how frequently the two men spoke, and Kavanaugh answered “not often,” and went on to note that Kozinski worked in Pasadena, California, while Kavanaugh currently works in D.C.)
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/09/kavanaugh-kozinski-gag-list-emails-senate-hearings.html?wpsrc=sh_all_dt_tw_ru
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