Lied under oath

Yale roommate says Kavanaugh lied under oath about drinking and yearbook

By Kate Sullivan

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."

Programming note: Watch CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360" for a televised interview with Roche.
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. "I cannot remember ever having a reason to distrust anything, large or small, that I have heard from Debbie," Roche writes.

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

Roche writes in the op-ed he is willing to speak to the FBI about his experiences with Kavanaugh and Ramirez. The FBI is conducting a supplemental background investigation into the nominee after Kavanaugh and Ford testified before the Judiciary Committee.

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."

Roche told CNN's Anderson Cooper on "Anderson Cooper 360" that 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 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"

In the Slate op-ed, Roche notes he was raised in a Republican family -- his mother was a Republican state representative in Connecticut and "my father owns a MAGA hat."

"This is not about drinking too much or even encouraging others to drink," Roche writes. "It is not about using coarse language or even about the gray area between testing sexual boundaries with a date and sexual abuse. This is about denial. This is about not facing consequences. This is about lying."

"I was not a choirboy, but—unlike Brett—I'm not going on national television and testifying under oath that I was," Roche continued.

Roche writes he did not initially want to come forward, and when The New Yorker's Ronan Farrow contacted him about Ramirez's account, "I told him that I didn't see the point. There is no way that Brett will face legal consequences after this much time." He eventually agreed to be quoted because, he writes, "Debbie needed someone to help her be heard."

As Kavanaugh's college roommate, Roche writes, he expected to be interviewed if a background check was looking into the nominee's college behavior. "I wasn't called," Roche said, echoing a tweet he sent Monday. "I assume college behavior was not a topic of interest. The FBI didn't find Debbie's story because they were not looking for it."

Roche writes he still has not been called by the FBI. "How will they learn what happened if once again they are not allowed to truly and thoroughly investigate?"

"In Brett's cases, if he is innocent, he should be cleared," Roche writes. "If he is not and he is being untruthful to the nation, that should disqualify him from sitting on the highest court in the land. This just seems fair."