The media is feverishly blasting the conspiracy theories that popped up after the attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

They are right to do so. I’ve been fortunate enough in my career as a journalist to have great editors who warned me about jumping into a story too quickly when you don’t know the facts. Mr. Pelosi is an elderly man who was assaulted by a nutcase. There is nothing funny about that and it’s irresponsible to speculate. Across the board, the media condemned the wild speculation and partisan mania that surrounded the incident.

Los Angeles Times columnist Jackie Calmes retweeted this tweet: “Nothing to see here, just the former Republican candidate for CA Governor joking about an assassination attempt on the speaker of the House.” It was a reference to Larry Elder, who made a joke about Pelosi. Over at CNN, Chris Cillizza also chimed in after Donald Trump Jr. joked about the assault:

[Donald] Trump Jr., even more so than his famous father, has reveled in the idea that he is the king of the deplorables – someone willing to say and do things that other people want to but are too afraid.

Double Standards and Media Bias

I sure could have used some of that skepticism in 2018. In September of that year, I got a call from Ronan Farrow from the New Yorker. He called me and told me I was in a letter along with Brett, a letter that accused us of taking part in “sexual misconduct” in “the 1980s.” Farrow couldn’t tell me the specific time, the place, or even who the accuser was.

On September 16, 2018, Emma Brown of the Washington Post broke the story: A woman named Christine Blasey Ford was accusing Brett of sexual assault. In her email to me that morning, Brown mentioned a woman named Leland Keyser, whom Ford claimed was at a party where Brett assaulted Ford. However, in her final published story, Brown left Leland Keyser out. She did so because Keyser denied any such party ever took place — and would later tell the FBI that she had been threatened if she didn’t support Ford. Kimberly Strassel at the Wall Street Journal noticed the omission.

Wow. And CNN reporting that the fourth person, Leland Keyser, is denying memory of knowing kavanaugh or of this event, even though "Keyser is a lifelong friend of Ford's."
Wow, again.

— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) September 23, 2018

During those long days in 2018, CNN was talking about me so much that even Jake Tapper had to ask, “Why are they so interested in Mark Judge?” On MSNBC, Stephanie Ruhle and Ali Velshi needed smelling salt while they were pouring through my old writings — and, me and Brett’s old high school yearbook from Georgetown Prep. NBC’s Kate Snow, who, like Emma Brown, withheld information that would have exonerated me and Brett, aired accusations about drugs and gang rapes from a woman whose story kept changing and ultimately fell apart. I mean — this was on NBC. The media was a pack of vicious wolves.

A Media Feeding Frenzy Inside a Dumpster

Rather than pause to check the facts, as the tales got crazier, the media stomped on the accelerator. CNN’s resident genius Chris Cilllizza was arguing that Avenatti — a man that a five-year-old could see was slimy — could become our next president. Avenatti, the disgraced lawyer, is now serving time for exortion and awaiting sentencing on a bunch of other charges.

John Heilemann, host of the idiotic and pretentious DNC propaganda show The Circus and a pal of convicted felon Michael Avenatti, was all over MSNBC claiming that he knew me when I was barfly in the 1980s. In October 2020, Heilemann tweeted this about the Hunter Biden story:

Whatever its origin, foreign or domestic, an awful lot about the Hunter Biden story doesn’t add up and stinks to high heaven.

Aside from screaming for me to be subpoenaed, Heilemann also claimed that in the 1980s I bought and sold cocaine, which is false. Heilemann based this fantasy on the fact that he worked with my older brother at a bar.

Interviewing the Ignorant, and Quoting Them as Sources

Jackie Calmes of the Los Angeles Times — the same Jackie Calmes now so nonplussed by the jokes about Pelosi — wrote a book about Brett, a book in which she used as one of her sources a man named Mike Sacks.

I’ve never met Mike Sacks. Mike Sacks didn’t know any of my friends. Mike Sacks did not go to the same school as me and Brett Kavanaugh. Mike Sacks was profiled in the Washington Post in October 2018 because the Washington Post could not find anyone who knew us who wanted to talk to them. “For the record,” the Post noted, “Sacks didn’t go to Georgetown Prep in Bethesda, the school Kavanaugh and Judge attended. He went to public school. He didn’t belong to a country club, just the neighborhood pool.”

That didn’t stop Calmes from treating Sacks as a source.

Mike Sacks, who grew up in affluent Potomac, Maryland, four years behind Kavanaugh, milked his memories of Washington’s Reagan-era suburbia for his media projects. While his family wasn’t rich and he didn’t go to a prep school or belong to a country club, Sacks spent time with “this entitled type,” as he describes Kavanaugh. “things had a tendency to happen while you were around them. When they got drunk, all bets were off.”

If the Lie is Lurid Enough, Print the Lie

As a last-ditch attempt to destroy us, in 2018 Avenatti produced Julie Swetnick. She accused me and Brett of being at multiple parties where girls were getting gang raped. Swetnick claimed that she herself was raped at one of these parties, telling NBC that she had filed a police report. Towards the end of Dissent, Calmes reveals that she tried to uncover the Swetnick report:

County officials never did search for any Swetnick police filling. The 1982 records had not been digitized, and the county records custodian told me in September 2019 that no one, including Avenatti, would pay the $1,260 charge for looking through there thousand boxes of hundreds of microfiche files for the year. I paid the county to do so, but rescinded the work order when Swetnick, in a brief interview before the search began, retracted her claim that she was assaulted in 1982. She’d specified that year in both her sworn statement and her NBC appearance, but a year later told me it could have been 1980 or 1981.

So: the only person Calmes could find to talk about me and Brett was … a guy who never met us. News media publicized a fictional police report for a crime that never happened. I never bought or sold cocaine.

Maybe Do Your Job ALL the Time?

A fraction of the skepticism that’s benefiting the Pelosis would have gone a long way when Brett and I were under the microscope. Not any special treatment, mind you. Just the hard-nosed journalistic skepticism that our glorious fourth estate is now exhibiting, when Democrats face wild charges.

Who am I kidding, though? We all know that the Stasi media protect their friends and savage their enemies.

Mark Judge is a writer and filmmaker in Washington, D.C. His new book is The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi.