Amherst College
Amherst College

A graduate of Amherst College has provided the Senate Judiciary Committee with a sworn declaration in support of the woman who first accused Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault.

Keith S. Koegler, a 1992 graduate and California lawyer, is one of four people who have submitted documents ahead of Thursday’s hearing vouching for Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, the California research psychologist who said Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a house party in 1982. Kavanaugh has denied the allegation.

All four letters, which included Ford’s husband and two of her friends, confirm that Ford disclosed to them at various points in recent years that she was assaulted.

Koegler’s two-page letter states that he has known Ford and her husband, Russell Ford, for more than five years and considers them close friends. The letters were posted to Twitter by NBC News National Correspondent Peter Alexander.

The first time Koegler learned that Christine had experienced sexual assault was in the summer of 2016, the letter states. He remembered the timing of the conversation because it was shortly after Stanford University student Brock Turner was sentenced for felony sexual assault after raping an unconscious woman on Stanford’s campus.

“Christine expressed anger at Mr. Turner’s lenient sentence, stating that she was particularly bothered by it because she was assaulted in high school by a man who was now a federal judge in Washington, D.C.,” Koegler wrote.

She did not bring up the assault to Koegler again until June 29, 2018, two days after Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his resignation from the Supreme Court, he wrote. On that day, she told him that Brett Kavanuagh was the person who assaulted her in high school in an email exchange.

“In all my dealings with Christine I have known her to be a serious and honorable person,” Koegler stated in the letter dated Sept. 24.

Ford’s husband wrote that his wife first told him about her experience with sexual assault around the time they got married in June 2002. It was during a couple’s therapy session in 2012 that Ford described the incident of being trapped in a room and molested by a boy as another watched.

“I remember her saying that the attacker’s name was Brett Kavanaugh, that he was a successful lawyer who had grown up in Christine’s home town, and that he was well-known in the Washington, D.C., community,” Russell wrote in his Sept. 25 latter.

Ford’s friend Adela Gildo-Mazzon said she first heard about the alleged incident when speaking with Ford at a restaurant in California in 2013. Gildo-Mazzon stated that she contacted Ford’s lawyers on Sept. 16 to verify that she had been told about the allegations.

The fourth declaration came from Ford’s neighbor and friend, Rebecca White, who was told in 2017 by Ford that she had been sexually assaulted as a young teen. Ford told her the assailant was now a federal judge.

The judge faces a second allegation from Deborah Ramirez who alleged that Kavanaugh exposed himself to her during a college part in the 1980s. A third allegation, by Julie Swetnick, accused Kavanaugh of regularly engaging in “excessive drinking and inappropriate contact of a sexual nature with women during the early 1980s” in a statement by her lawyer, Michael Avenatti.

Kavanaugh has denied the womens’ claims, and asserted on Fox News that he has never sexually assaulted anyone and vowed to not withdraw his nomination.

President Donald Trump and Republicans have questioned that credibility of the accusers and have suggested the allegations as part of a Democratic “smear campaign” against Kavanaugh.

Luis Fieldman can be reached at lfieldman@gazettenet.com