Inside Sundance’s Top-Secret Brett Kavanaugh Documentary - Rolling Stone

A corporate eyebrow was raised erstwhile the 2023 Sundance Film Festival announced a last-minute summation to the lineup: Justice, a documentary probing the allegations of sexual misconduct against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. That the movie marked the archetypal documentary directed by Doug Liman, the antheral down Swingers and The Bourne Identity, and was produced by Amy Herdy, an ex-journalist and cardinal researcher for the documentaries Allen v. Farrow and On the Record, lone piqued curiosity further. Would the movie incorporate caller claims against Kavanaugh beyond what emerged during and astir his explosive proceeding successful beforehand of the Senate Judiciary Committee? Or possibly connection caller grounds corroborating the accounts of women who’d already travel guardant against Kavanaugh alleging a scope of intersexual misconduct, including Christine Blasey Ford, Deborah Ramirez and Julie Swetnick?

Justice debuted connected Jan. 20 to a capableness assemblage of 295 radical astatine Sundance’s Park Avenue Theatre, including a fewer twelve members of the press. Liman made his full unit motion NDAs and financed the task himself successful bid to support it wholly nether wraps.

And the movie raises much questions than it answers.

It opens with Liman seated connected a sofa crossed from Christine Blasey Ford, who questions him astir wherefore he, a Hollywood director, wanted to marque this film. Only the backmost of Ford’s caput is visible, and she does not look on-camera again, prevention archival footage of her almighty testimony. In a post-screening Q&A, Liman said that helium chose not to see caller footage of Ford successful bid to spare her the added scrutiny and threats. Swetnick, meanwhile, goes unmentioned.

Most of the film’s attraction concerns Deborah Ramirez, who told The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer that portion a freshman astatine Yale successful 1983, “Kavanaugh had exposed himself astatine a drunken dormitory party, thrust his penis successful her face, and caused her to interaction it without her consent arsenic she pushed him away.” She repeats those allegations during a sit-down interrogation successful Justice. (Kavanaugh has denied each allegations of intersexual misconduct.)

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While the FBI spoke with Ramirez arsenic portion of their one-week “limited scope” probe into Trump nominee Kavanaugh’s alleged intersexual misconduct, yet concluding they recovered “no corroboration of the allegations [of intersexual misconduct],” starring to the blimpish Justice’s beingness assignment to the Supreme Court, Bureau agents admittedly failed to truthful overmuch arsenic speech to a fig of radical who either corroborated her relationship oregon had different stories of Kavanaugh’s behaviour astatine Yale.

The biggest uncover successful Justice concerns Max Stier, a Yale classmate of Kavanaugh’s. According to the publication The Education of Brett Kavanaugh, by New York Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, Stier, who runs the Partnership for Public Service, a salient nonprofit (and nonpartisan) enactment successful Washington, D.C., informed senators and the FBI that helium “saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down astatine a antithetic drunken dorm party, wherever friends pushed his penis into the manus of a pistillate student,” but that the FBI did not travel up with him. Justice goes 1 measurement further, airing an audio signaling of Stier’s account, which the filmmakers accidental was entrusted to them by an anonymous source. (Stier declined to talk to the filmmakers, arsenic did Kavanaugh.)

“This is thing that I reported to my woman years ago,” Stier says, earlier going into item astir however he’d heard a communicative “firsthand” of Kavanaugh’s friends asking a heavy inebriated young pistillate to “hold his penis” during a dorm party. He besides recalls connected the audio an alleged occurrence he’d heard wherein a drunken Kavanaugh attempted to insert his penis into the rima of a young pistillate astatine a dorm enactment portion she was astir passed retired connected the level from drinking.

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Elsewhere successful Justice, respective Yale classmates of Ramirez’s explicit their vexation with the FBI implicit failing to interrogation them, and adjacent suggest that Kavanaugh’s squad was contacting Yale classmates of theirs during the enquiry to effort to steer them successful his direction. A bid of substance messages are shown successful the movie that look to amusement Yale classmates of Kavanaugh’s discussing however members of Kavanaugh’s ellipse had contacted them astir their recollections with respect to the Ramirez allegations. Since Kavanaugh was adamant that helium did nary specified happening during his grounds earlier the Senate Judiciary Committee, the movie contends that helium committed perjury.

More than anything, though, Justice feels similar a awesome flare for aboriginal accusers and witnesses of Kavanaugh’s alleged intersexual misconduct to travel forward. The property was informed that the 83-minute mentation screened astatine Sundance was not a last cut, and Herdy and Liman told festivalgoers during the post-screening Q&A that they’d received caller tips since announcing the documentary connected Jan. 19, and that the movie — and their probe — is not yet finished.