UW professor disputes Kavanaugh’s claims about drinking habits

Throughout Brett Kavanaugh’s hearing on Thursday, the idea that he’s not a heavy drinker has been a cornerstone of his argument with his character being called into question. Recent accounts from a University of Washington professor, though, seem to fly in the face of Kavanaugh’s claims.

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In an interview with The New York Times, UW’s own Dr. Elizabeth Swisher, a Yale classmate of Judge Kavanaugh, said that she “saw (Kavanaugh) very drunk many times and there is no way he remembers everything about every night.” Swisher, working currently as a professor of gynecologic oncology and adjunct professor in medical genetics, goes on to doubt the assertion that Kavanaugh “never had a blackout.”

“Brett was a sloppy drunk, and I know because I drank with him,” Swisher also told The Washington Post. “I watched him drink more than a lot of people. He’d end up slurring his words, stumbling.”

While she admits that “there’s no medical way I can say that he was blacked out,” she notes that “it’s not credible for him to say that he has had no memory lapses in the nights that he drank to excess” while attending Yale University.

Swisher’s accounts paint a picture in direct opposition to the one Kavanaugh has drawn, both in interviews with the media and in his sworn testimony to the Senate. Despite that, Kavanaugh again denied that assertion when pressed on Swisher’s statements by Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, directly following Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

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