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Brett Kavanaugh's Former Roommate Describes Their Debauched Dorm at Yale
https://www.thecut.com/2018/09/kavanaugh-roommate-yale-dorm-room.htmlIn the fall of 1983, three weeks into his freshman year at Yale, Kit Winter switched dorm rooms. He had been sharing a room on the fourth floor of Lawrance Hall, entryway D, with a kid from Rhode Island named James Garman. But Garman was studious and Winter liked to stay up late, and they had heard about an unoccupied single in the basement. So they cooked up a scheme to tell the dean that they weren’t getting along, and Winter moved down to LD01, a three-man suite, where two rooms opened up onto a large living area. Winter took over the empty single. The double was already occupied. James Roche, who has publicly supported Deborah Ramirez in her account of being sexually threatened by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, lived there. And so did Kavanaugh himself.
Winter immediately noted the cold, alienated dynamic in LD01; the place was profoundly inhospitable even by 1980s college standards. “It was a dungeon space,” recollects Garman, now an organic farmer. “It was dark and it was cellar-like, and it was thoroughly creepy.”
And while on the first floor of entryway C, a group of guys had gotten together some furniture and a big-screen TV, creating a gathering place for people who liked to watch sports, the living room down in LD01 remained entirely unfurnished except for an old keg — “and I think there was also a broken floor lamp much of the time,” Winter recalls. “And as you might expect in a sizable empty room, there were a lot of dust balls and Solo cups and trash on the floor. It was not an inviting space. It was pretty grim.” The environment was disturbing enough that Winter mentioned it to his high school friend Itamar Kubovy, who also ultimately went to Yale. “I remember Kit saying how uncomfortable it was, how creepy it was,” Kubovy recalls. [Editor’s note: Winter, Kubovy, and I went to high school together in New Haven, and Winter’s family and mine were friends.]
Especially disgusting was the shared bathroom, which was always covered in vomit. Kavanaugh and his crowd, whom Winter characterizes as “loud, obnoxious frat boy-like drunks” were the hardest drinkers on campus even back then, when hard drinking did not hold the stigma it does today. In a statement earlier this week, Roche recalled Kavanaugh “frequently drinking excessively and becoming incoherently drunk,” and Winter corroborates that recollection. “There was a lot of vomit in the bathroom. No one ever cleaned it up. It was disgusting. It wasn’t incidental. It wasn’t, ‘Oh, this weekend someone puked in the bathroom.’ People were constantly puking in the bathroom. Constantly.” Lori Adams, a retired psychiatrist in Underhill, Vermont, was a friend of Winter’s at Yale. “I remember,” she says, “that you couldn’t use the bathroom because his roommates vomited all over the floor and didn’t clean it up.” (Winter clarifies that Roche wasn’t much of a drinker and that although he himself drank a fair amount during freshman year, he very rarely drank to the point of throwing up.)
Winter immediately noted the cold, alienated dynamic in LD01; the place was profoundly inhospitable even by 1980s college standards. “It was a dungeon space,” recollects Garman, now an organic farmer. “It was dark and it was cellar-like, and it was thoroughly creepy.”
And while on the first floor of entryway C, a group of guys had gotten together some furniture and a big-screen TV, creating a gathering place for people who liked to watch sports, the living room down in LD01 remained entirely unfurnished except for an old keg — “and I think there was also a broken floor lamp much of the time,” Winter recalls. “And as you might expect in a sizable empty room, there were a lot of dust balls and Solo cups and trash on the floor. It was not an inviting space. It was pretty grim.” The environment was disturbing enough that Winter mentioned it to his high school friend Itamar Kubovy, who also ultimately went to Yale. “I remember Kit saying how uncomfortable it was, how creepy it was,” Kubovy recalls. [Editor’s note: Winter, Kubovy, and I went to high school together in New Haven, and Winter’s family and mine were friends.]
Especially disgusting was the shared bathroom, which was always covered in vomit. Kavanaugh and his crowd, whom Winter characterizes as “loud, obnoxious frat boy-like drunks” were the hardest drinkers on campus even back then, when hard drinking did not hold the stigma it does today. In a statement earlier this week, Roche recalled Kavanaugh “frequently drinking excessively and becoming incoherently drunk,” and Winter corroborates that recollection. “There was a lot of vomit in the bathroom. No one ever cleaned it up. It was disgusting. It wasn’t incidental. It wasn’t, ‘Oh, this weekend someone puked in the bathroom.’ People were constantly puking in the bathroom. Constantly.” Lori Adams, a retired psychiatrist in Underhill, Vermont, was a friend of Winter’s at Yale. “I remember,” she says, “that you couldn’t use the bathroom because his roommates vomited all over the floor and didn’t clean it up.” (Winter clarifies that Roche wasn’t much of a drinker and that although he himself drank a fair amount during freshman year, he very rarely drank to the point of throwing up.)
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