I knew he was a typical, hardcore, right-wing, win-by-any-means-necessary, Christian hypocrite of the highest order. But this?
As a former professional partisan, I never thought I’d look back decades to my political beginnings and find the map that points to our current moment, when there is serious doubt whether the democracy we took for granted at the time will continue to exist. Despite all the posturing and gamesmanship and at times skullduggery back then, political opponents shared an understanding that the process enforced by our Constitution would prevail, no one would get everything they wanted every time, and the state of the union would remain strong. As it turns out, too many people like me stuck our heads in the sand, swallowed our doubts, let the unacceptable slide, convinced ourselves it was in the interest of the greater good, and never dreamed that we would look back and realize that a failure to say “Enough!” had led to our country’s biggest existential crisis since the Civil War.
I entered what as I now see as our long national unraveling during the Clinton impeachment, as an adviser to independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, and over the next couple of decades as I remained personally and professionally dedicated to him. Only in the last three years, thanks to the hold of an unhinged liar and mega-grifter on my party and so it seems my old mentor, have I been able to recognize that Starr has been at the intersection of so many wrong turns our country has made. And now, as he attaches himself to a new presidential prospect and joins former Vice President Mike Pence at a Family Leadership Summit in Iowa this coming weekend, it has become clear to me that I am morally — indeed patriotically — obligated to speak up for the moral decency my old mentor continues to violate in the name of moral decency.
It is undeniably fitting that this account should turn on the cliché of the scarlet letter. For somehow Starr’s role as the nation’s parson always comes back around to sex. Perhaps his fascination was heightened early on by his involvement in the Packwood Diaries scandal, but most notably, of course, was his 1998 pursuit of former president Clinton over his sexual relationship with a White House intern, which was bookended by his recent impeachment foray, this time defending an adulterous President, who lies about so much more sin than that. And in between he zealously took up the cause of a Supreme Court nominee accused of sexual assault, Jeffrey Epstein, a Baylor University football player accused of rape and even a schoolteacher in suburban Virginia found guilty of molesting 5 young school girls. And even still, in 2021, he published his latest book extolling the virtues of intersecting religion and the judiciary. Starr is “all in” for ramming the most extreme of White conservative judges, experienced or not, that will decide human fates based on Christian beliefs into federal, life-tenured seats. Forget the separation of church and state! That’s not what the founding fathers intended according to him.
I can date the beginning of my own rebirth to July 9, 2018, the day Donald Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to be an associate justice on the Supreme Court. I sent Starr a text saying, “You said to me 20 years ago, that Brett was ‘going places’ Clearly!” [punctuation sic] It was my first communication to Starr in memory that went unanswered, and I wondered if he picked up that my message had a bit of an edge. I had met Kavanaugh in 1998 when he was a 33-year-old member of then, Independent Counsel Starr’s team investigating Bill Clinton, and I was a 39-year-old strategic communications consultant hired to help prep Starr to present Congress with his legendary report detailing President Bill Clinton’s sexual interactions with a Monica Lewinsky. One day after a meeting at the independent counsel offices, I was alone in a conference room collecting materials when Kavanaugh entered. He began berating me and invading my personal space in a deranged fury that sent me into flight around the table.
After I invoked “Judge Starr” a few times, a deflated Kavanaugh left, but I felt duty bound to report the incident to Starr. As my client, he needed to be informed about anything that might raise a red flag, and my pulse rate told me this was one. Starr reacted with seeming surprise, saying Brett was probably being protective of him, and moreover was destined for great things — possibly the Supreme Court. “Not if he treats women like that he won’t,” I replied. I then asked Ken to seek an apology from Brett on my behalf and was told, “I’m apologizing to you for him. This is it.” Hence my text to Starr in 2018 acknowledging his prediction.
As Kavanaugh’s confirmation process proceeded, I had no plans to come forward about that encounter. Though I found Christine Blasey Ford credible when she described being assaulted by Kavanaugh as a teenager, I wasn’t sure about the relevance of my experience, which, though quite aggressive and unsettling, was not physically violent and I did not suspect it was alcohol-fueled because at the time I didn’t know that Kavanaugh had been a well-known blackout drunk in college. It was only when I saw his snarling “refutation” of Blasey Ford that I realized that his almost feral belligerence in that conference room more than 20 years earlier had not been a one-off.
After a sleepless weekend of pacing, planning and crying out of sheer heartsickness over what was happening to my country, I submitted a statement describing the incident to two Democratic senators and two Republicans including Jeff Flake, the Arizona senator who had succeeded in postponing the vote on Kavanaugh until the FBI conducted an investigation into the mounting charges that were far more serious than mine. The next day, on Wednesday October 3, I texted a message to Starr via his now deceased good friend Tim O’Brien, a former ABC News reporter who had covered the Clinton impeachment. I knew O’Brien was with Starr and his wife, Alice, on an annual bike trip that a group of friends had been taking for years, this one to Croatia.
I had been on the bike trip through Tuscany in 2009. Early one evening while our spouses were at dinner elsewhere, Starr had stepped out from the shadows of the grounds of the inn where we were staying and called me over. After expressing his feelings for me, he pulled me into an embrace. This was the beginning of a fond, consensual affair that I had every intention of taking to the grave, even if it probably wasn’t an accident that I chose O’Brien of all my friends on that Croatia trip to send my text to during the Kavanaugh hearings. When I had drawn back from that first kiss in Italy, I noticed that O’Brien was looking at us from the balcony above. Though I can’t be sure O’Brien could see that Starr had taken my hand and placed it on his crotch, there can be little doubt that he saw the kiss Starr had initiated. And when I expressed to Ken my horror at having been observed, he had said, “It’s O.K., he understands.” Nine years later, I was reasonably sure O’Brien would relay my text message to Starr.
I look back on that text now with a bit of compassion for my naive faith in my political party’s better angels. “I would like for Ken and Alice to know that I pray for Brett to step aside and I hope Ken can look him in the eye and release him from this for the sake of his family and this country,” I wrote. “I had a problem with Brett 20 years ago. Ken knows… Murkowski, Coons, Flake and Hirono have a statement from me about what happened. The FBI is not involved. The press is not involved — yet… My God… Brett is not right. Do what you think is best.” I also left a voicemail with O’Brien in a trembling voice. I thought that if I could slow this crazy train for just a few days, more would come out about Kavanaugh and they would decide he just wasn’t worth it and move on. After all, there were other potential appointees in the queue, including Amy Coney Barrett.
That, of course, is not what happened, though Tim did indeed get my text, according to the “read” notification I received. And he returned my call — or rather left me a message saying he “saw” I called, never mentioning the text. But that callback came early the following week, and the vote to give Kavanaugh his life-long seat on the high court had already taken place the previous Saturday, October 6. Whether Starr had any coordination with the Kavanaugh team in Washington I don’t know — and in any case those advisers had bigger brush fires than me to put out, like the potential witnesses to the nominee’s alleged exposed penis at Yale.
I dealt with my dismay over Kavanaugh’s confirmation by going to North Dakota soon after to work for the reelection campaign of Senator Heidi Heitkamp, a vulnerable, moderate Democrat made even more so by her principled vote against him.There, I met several women and men from all over the country who came because of Kavanaugh and like me, not all of them were Democrats. While Heitkamp was losing her seat on Election Day, November 6, my account of my 1998 encounter with Kavanaugh was the most read story on Slate.com. My editors had had to call Starr for comment, and I was stunned when I read his statement in print. His “I do not recall any mention of any incident involving Brett Kavanaugh” was surprising enough. But the ensuing embellishment went way beyond lawyerly parsing and into the realm of falsehood: “To the contrary, throughout his service in the independent counsel’s office, now-Justice Kavanaugh comported himself at all times with high professionalism and respect toward all our colleagues.”
Could he really have written that with a straight face after an older and presumably wiser Kavanaugh had just demonstrated the opposite of high professionalism and respect while auditioning for one of the highest offices in the land? Had, in fact, just repeated the very, explosive behavior of which I had accused him — both at the time it happened and in the Slate article? That Starr, this man I had for so long respected and at the time still did, had basically called me a liar in print made me begin to reexamine my entire association with him.
There was the time in January 2010 when I saw him in California — he was then dean of the Pepperdine University School of Law — and he asked me, if on my next visit to South Florida, I could extend myself to counsel a “very wealthy, very smart businessman who got himself into trouble for getting involved with a couple of underage girls who lied about their ages.” I confess I did not recognize Jeffrey Epstein’s name at the time, but I knew what statutory rape was and I couldn’t understand why Ken Starr would be involved with him. “Is this a church thing?” I asked. “Are you trying to ‘cure’ him? Why would you do this!” It did not occur to me that he might have been part of the legal team that executed a secret and egregious sweetheart deal for the convicted pedophile or that the stickler for details I knew Starr to be might be grossly undercounting the victims in question. “Everyone deserves representation, Judi,” he said, adding, “He promised to keep it above 18 from now on.” According to an alleged victim statement after the fact, the middle-aged, child molestor, Jeffrey Epstein, did not keep his sex with girls above the age of 18.
At my core during the Clinton impeachment I knew that what the Starr team was doing to a young woman not much older than 18 was wrong, yet I fell for Starr’s mantra, which he repeated in 2018 on NPR when he was promoting his book, “Contempt,” which in a nutshell is where he vaccilates between his deep disdain for the Clinton’s and whining about the reasons he’s not on the Supreme Court, “No one is above the law,” and “what we’re really talking about ultimately is obstruction of justice and the abuse of power.” Starr told me back then, “She brought this on herself, she should have cooperated.” Somehow, he managed to maintain his missionary image, down to making me smile by proposing cocktails: “Shall we have a sarsaparilla?”
Our affair ran its course after a year or so of occasional encounters and a steady exchange of affectionate texts and emails. No fireworks, no drama. I remained his adviser and supporter and he mine and we continued to talk frequently. Later, when I was living and working in Texas, I tried to help him weather his beleaguered tenure at Baylor and then in 2016, when he was fired as a result of a rape scandal involving the college football team, I ran interference for him as best I could. It was a an interview I watched in 2020 with one of Baylor’s aggrieved accusers that helped me understand how I could have been blind for so long to the pattern of misogyny coursing through Starr’s career. Describing a meeting with Starr about her ordeal, she said that he shed a tear along with her, made her feel heard, but did nothing to help get justice for her or the many other female students who came forward with allegations. Unless you count what he said in one interview, “We grieve for what happened. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t say it’s a new day. That’s the biblical perspective that we try to live up to here at Baylor University.” Shamelessly and effectively, he shoved rape allegations under the carpet in the name of Christianity.
It took me 20 years to pull my head out of the proverbial sand, but I can see clearly now all the harm Ken Starr has done from the 1990s and now beyond as he reaches for Mike Pence’s presumed coattails. Seeing him lend his practiced piety to a president who lies so much that he was considered by his previous lawyers to be a walking perjury machine along with his sanctimonious “Religious Liberty in Crisis” campaign that he is presently stumping around the country, has made my story suddenly feel urgent. It’s not just the hypocrisy, it’s the damage Starr’s sham moral authority has done to — our nation, to our people, and remember those children his client separated from their parents and put in cages at the border?
I don’t know if Ken will lie about sex with me. Presumably he would not lie about it under oath after having a president impeached for doing the same. But like Ken, I do believe in God, and surely God will be ready with a roster of “Would Judi be lying if she said…” queries such as he forced a sitting president to answer in front of the world. The inexplicably vulgar questions that were asked of a disgraced, red-faced Bill Clinton — about cigars and oral sex — were, of course, scripted by a young Brett Kavanaugh, who is now Starr’s legacy on the Supreme Court.
It is my fervent hope that every time Ken Starr enters a church, when he bows his head to pray, that he sees the faces of all the children and women who had been harmed and that he could have helped, but did not. In my own view, “He didn’t see them because they were invisible to him.” And perhaps one day the prophecy that Kavanaugh uttered in his confirmation hearings — “What goes around comes around” — will boomerang back on our mutual mentor as well before he harms us any further.
I’ll just leave that here for now.
Wow.