“Senator Booker’s Stanford Daily column has been the focus of disingenuous right-wing attacks that have circulated online and in partisan outlets for the past five years,” a spokeswoman for Booker said in an email. “These attacks ring hollow to anyone who reads the entirety of the column, which is in fact a direct criticism of a culture that encourages young men to take advantage of women — written at a time when so candidly discussing these issues was rare — and speaks to the impact Senator Booker’s experience working to help rape and sexual assault survivors as a college peer counselor had on him.”<doc-sep>(CNN) — As Washington continues to play a game of wait and see on whether Christine Blasey Ford, the woman accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, will testify in Washington next week, an old-but-new-again incident involving a prominent Democratic senator – and potential 2020 challenger to Trump – has reemerged. New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker wrote in the early 1990s – while a student at Stanford – about an incident on New Year’s Eve 1984 (when he was 15) in which he groped a female friend’s breast after the two of them had kissed. “With the ‘Top Gun’ slogan ringing in my head, I slowly reached for her breast,” Booker wrote of that night. “After having my hand pushed away once, I reached my ‘mark.’” The point of Booker’s column was how that moment, and his work on the issue after, had changed him – and his views on women, consent and assault – forever. “It was a wake-up call,” Booker wrote in his Stanford column. “I will never be the same.” With Booker, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, playing a high-profile role in pushing for an FBI investigation into the incident alleged by Ford, some Republicans – and their aligned conservative websites – have resurfaced the incident as evidence of Booker’s hypocrisy. “Booker facing criticism for Kavanaugh reaction after admitting to groping friend in high school,” read the headline on a piece on the Daily Caller website. And, yes, it’s true that there are some similarities between the two episodes: Both Booker and Kavanaugh were teenagers, and the incidents – admitted to and alleged, respectively – happened decades before they entered public life in any meaningful way. So why is Kavanaugh being raked over the coals – and watching his nomination to the Supreme Court be jeopardized – while Booker just gets a pass? For a lot of reasons – all of which explain why this comparison is overly facile and just doesn’t hold up. (Nota bene: Kavanaugh unequivocally denies the allegations about him by Ford and has already accepted an invitation to testify under oath about his conduct next week in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee.) First, and most importantly, the reason we know about the groping incident involving Booker is because Booker told us about it. He wrote publicly about it – and used it as a way to explain how he evolved as a person. While that doesn’t absolve him of his behavior – just because you admit something publicly and apologize doesn’t mean you didn’t do it – it does make for a very different situation than faces Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh has never mentioned the alleged episode with Ford publicly before. (Kavanaugh and his defenders would insist that’s because he didn’t do it.) We are learning about the accusation from the alleged victim, not from the alleged perpetrator. No one – including Booker – disputes that he behaved badly as a teenager. The memories of Kavanaugh and Ford are totally contradictory, with both arguing that the other is simply wrong or misremembering the facts. Second, the situations of Kavanaugh and Booker are different. Booker is an elected official who, every six years, stands before voters. If voters believe his groping incident – or any other element of his past or present – is disqualifying, they get to have their say. They can vote him out. That’s not the situation in which Kavanaugh finds himself. He has been nominated to a lifetime appointment on the most powerful court in the country. The public won’t ever get to offer up its judgment on his character – that will be up to the 21 members of the Senate Judiciary Committee and, if he makes it through that vote, the full Senate. Just 100 people in the country will get a one-time-only vote on whether or not Kavanaugh has the judgment and temperament to sit on the Supreme Court and offer his opinions on the pressing issues of today – and lots of tomorrows. That’s a very different thing than a senator – or even a president – who has to face millions (or tens of millions) voters every four or six years. Look. The allegations made by Ford against Kavanaugh are serious in lots of ways. They raise questions about who we do – and should – believe in these situations. They raise questions about how long ago – if ever – is too long ago to dig up an alleged incident and make a public figure answer for it. They raise questions about what it means to be a woman in modern society. They raise questions about we, collectively, should react and process these sorts of allegations. All of that is important – not just for whether or not Kavanaugh gets confirmed but for us as a society. For too long, these sorts of questions were dismissed. The rise of the #MeToo movement and the cavalcade of high-profile men admitting to behavior that ranges from boorish to criminal has opened eyes and forced uncomfortable and important conversations. The accusations against Kavanaugh are another moment to examine our assumptions and talk openly about how we should bets approach these situations – both now and going forward. What we don’t need amid all of this is an epic bout of “whatboutism.” What Booker did as a teenager wasn’t right. And he has been and will be judged by voters on them. But to turn Booker into a political missile to prove hypocrisy misses the mark. This isn’t about Booker. This is about Ford, Kavanaugh, and how we, together, figure out the right way forward.<doc-sep>Fox News host Laura Ingraham defended Democratic Senator Cory Booker after an anonymous allegation of sexual assault against him was posted online. But Ingraham also referred to Booker's comments about the allegations leveled at Brett Kavanaugh, claiming that Booker had been "tarring" the now Supreme Court Justice with a "mountain of evidence," which she said "ended up being nothing." After Trump nominated Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, Christine Blasey Ford testified to senators about allegations that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a party in the early 1980s, when they were both teenagers. Kavanaugh denied Ford's allegations, initially made in a letter to a senator and leaked to the media without revealing her name. Other women also came forward with allegations of sexual misconduct against Kavanaugh, which he also denied. Booker described Ford's testimony as "raw and visceral and credible, a profoundly powerful testimony with this committee and the world, and she was believable. I believe her." "We don't raise this issue because we automatically assume it has credibility," Ingraham said during her show on Monday night, regarding the vague allegations made anonymously against Booker. "I don't like anonymous allegations. We actually think everyone should wait for the details to come in before we say something like this, right?" Ingraham then played a clip of Booker asking if Kavanaugh is "the right person to sit on the highest court in the land for a lifetime appointment when their credibility has been challenged...ultimately, have enough questions been raised that we should not move on to another candidate?" Ingraham said, "We don't lend much, if any, credence to anonymous accusations without any more detail. I think if you're gonna make an allegation like this, you've got to put your name to it." "I don't like it when people do this kind of stuff," Ingraham continued. "I believe it is a smear. I mean, if you're going to make an accusation—this is a supposedly a man making an accusation that something happened in a bathroom—if you're going to make that kind of accusation, you better put your name to it. "Our point is a simple one: We have major media outlets during Kavanaugh rolling with this anonymous stuff. And you have people like Cory Booker out there tarring Brett Kavanaugh because of the mountain of evidence, which ended up being nothing." Civil rights attorney Leo Terrell appeared on the show and seemed to raise doubts over Ingraham comparing an anonymous letter posted online with Ford's testimony. "Are we equating this anonymous person with Professor Ford, who came before the Senate, went to the F.B.I., are we making the equivalence?" he asked.<doc-sep>
A 1992 column by now-Sen. Cory Booker detailing his “groping” of a high school friend has resurfaced as he pushes to delay Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings over a sexual assault allegation. In the 1992 column for The Stanford Daily, then-Stanford University grad student Mr. Booker wrote about the New Year’s Eve incident in 1984 that he will “never forget.” In the column, titled, “So much for stealing second,” Mr. Booker said he was 15 when he fondled an intoxicated female friend. “With the ‘Top Gun’ slogan ringing in my head, I slowly reached for her breast,” he wrote. “After having my hand pushed away once, I reached my ‘mark.’ Our groping ended soon and while no ‘relationship’ ensued, a friendship did. You see, the next week in school she told me that she was drunk that night and didn’t really know what she was doing.” Mr. Booker said he was conditioned to believe that sex was “a game,” and that hooking up was best achieved through “luck, guile, strategy or coercion,” and lots of alcohol. He wrote about how his attitude toward sex dramatically changed after just a couple years at Stanford, and how his work as a peer counselor listening to the “raw truth from men and women discussing rape” was a real “wake-up call” for the future senator. “I now see the crowds, no, not the spectators, but the thousands, the millions who are rarely seen or heard,” he said of sexual assault victims. Mr. Booker, who said this week that it would be “irresponsible” for him to not consider a 2020 presidential run, has been recently ridiculed by conservatives after he appeared to dub himself “Spartacus” by revealing confidential records during the Judge Kavanaugh hearing. The senator now wants the FBI to investigate a claim by a woman who accused Judge Kavanaugh of trying to rape her more than 35 years ago before the hearings continue. Paul Mulshine, a columnist for New Jersey’s Star-Ledger, said Mr. Booker’s column has been circulating in conservative circles since 2013, when the Daily Caller ran a piece about it. It resurfaced on social media this week after the Democrat deemed Judge Kavanaugh’s accuser to be credible. Mr. Booker’s office on Thursday strongly defended the column. “This disingenuous right-wing attack, which has circulated online and in partisan outlets for the past five years, rings hollow to anyone who reads the entirety of Senator Booker’s Stanford Daily column,” a spokesperson for the senator told Fox News. “The column is in fact a direct criticism of a culture that encourages young men to take advantage of women — written at a time when so candidly discussing these issues was rare — and speaks to the impact Senator Booker’s experience working to help rape and sexual assault survivors as a college peer counselor had on him,” the spokesperson said, Fox News reported. Sign up for Daily Newsletters Manage Newsletters Copyright © 2021 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.