The notion that Brett Kavanaugh has always been respectful of women is taking another hit from his undergraduate alma mater, Yale University. Earlier today, the university published an article stating that he was a member of two organizations with a less-than-stellar track record with female students. The Yale Daily News reports that Kavanaugh was a member of the fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE) and an all-male secret society called Truth and Courage — which is often referred to by a more vulgar name.
Raw Story reports that during his years as a brother of DKE at Yale, the organization was photographed for the Yale Daily News waving a flag they made out of women’s bras and underpants. In the years after Kavanaugh graduated from Yale, DKE was banned for several years from campus for marching in front of the campus women’s center chanting “no means yes” and other misogynistic phrases. Some of these incidents were caught on video and reported to the university.
The flag of bras and women’s underpants appeared on the front page of the Yale newspaper. When questioned, Steve Gallo, a member of the fraternity who pledged in 1985, said that all of the underwear was “obtained consensually,” often through scavenger hunts.
A photograph that appeared in @yaledailynews on Jan. 18, 1985, shows Brett Kavanaugh’s fraternity brothers waving a flag woven from women’s underwear as part of a procession of DKE initiates marching across Yale’s campus, via @Hailey_Fuchs @BrittonDaly https://t.co/zOp7JbgMmn pic.twitter.com/oyaKHHXfhy
— Yale Daily News (@yaledailynews) September 20, 2018
Rachel Eisler, class of 1986, claimed in a letter to the editor that waving the aforementioned flag around campus demeans women. She detailed that when she asked a member why men’s undergarments weren’t on the flag, he defended himself claiming that he didn’t make it, before adding that maybe the flag contained something that belonged to her.
“‘But hey, your panties might be here!”
Jennifer Lew, class of 1987, said that DKE would ransack women’s rooms while they were in class in an effort to collect panties for their scavenger hunts. Julie Klein, 1987, referred to Kavanaugh’s fraternity as “animal house.”
Judge Brett Kavanaugh has not spoken publicly about his time as a member of DKE or Truth and Courage, but during a 2014 speech to the Yale Law School Federalist Society, he recalled a night of heavy drinking where he remembered “falling out of [a] bus onto the front steps of the Yale Law School at about 4:45 a.m” after a Boston pub crawl.
In more recent times, Brett Kavanaugh’s character has been called into question during his days as Assistant Special Counsel under Kenneth Starr, as reported by Inquisitr . On CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper , political consultant Paul Begala had harsh words for Kavanaugh during his years investigating the suicide of White House Counsel Vince Foster.
“By reopening the investigation of Vince Foster’s suicide Kavanaugh tormented the Foster family in the most vicious, cruel, abuse of power I think I’ve ever seen in 30 years. If he would do something that horrible, I don’t know what he was like in high school.”
