Julie Swetnick, in her first broadcast television interview since accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, told NBC News national correspondent Kate Snow she couldn’t be sure that Kavanaugh was one of the boys who assaulted her during a party in the 1980s.
Swetnick, in a sworn affidavit released last week by her attorney Michael Avenatti, said she was the victim of a gang rape at a party, at which she also saw Kavanaugh behave inappropriately toward women.
“I cannot specifically say that he was one of the ones who assaulted me,” Swetnick told Snow. “But, before this happened to me, at that party, I saw Brett Kavanaugh there, I saw Mark Judge, and they were hanging out about where I started to feel disoriented and where the room was and where the other boys were hanging out and laughing.”
Swetnick, asked to respond to Kavanaugh’s denial of her allegations, said that “he is an admitted blackout drunk and drug addict.”
In her sworn statement, Swetnick claimed that Kavanaugh “consistently engage(d) in excessive drinking and inappropriate contact of a sexual nature with women in the early 1980s.”
Before airing the interview, Snow said: “NBC News, for the record, has not been able to independently verify her claims. There are things she told us on camera that differ from her written statements last week.”
After the interview, Snow told MSNBC anchor Ari Melber, “We’re not discounting what she said in any way. We’re just doing our reporting. … There are a lot of people working on this.”
Swetnick described the attack and the impact it had on her. “What happened to me is probably the most horrendous, awful thing that could happen to a human being,” she said. “My body was violated, my soul was broken. It felt like somebody took me and basically said, ‘You’re worthless, you’re nothing to us, you’re disposable.”
On Monday morning, Avenatti tweeted a picture of Snow interviewing his client, along with the hashtags “#Truth #Facts #Courage #Justice.” The interview was reportedly conducted on Sunday.
Late last week, Swetnick was interviewed by John Heilemann, co-host of the Showtime documentary series The Circus, which aired Sunday night
Avenatti, who is pondering a 2020 presidential run, has been attacked by name by some of the most prominent members of the Republican Party, including President Donald Trump, who last week called him a “con artist” and a “low-life.”
Without specifically naming her, Trump said Monday at an event at the White House that Swetnick “has very little credibility.” But he added that if she has any credibility, she should be interviewed as part of the FBI’s investigation.
(Read more in: The Hollywood Reporter