Chasing the Truth About Kavanaugh (with Jane Mayer)

Air date: 10/4/18

Preet Bharara:

Jane Mayer, thank you so much for being on the show.

Jane Mayer:

I’m so glad to be here with you.

Preet Bharara:

So I had a line of questions that I’m going to abandon for the moment because something very dramatic happened. We’re recording this on Tuesday about lunchtime in Washington D.C. at the National Press Club, and right before we began taping, you got a phone call and we had to delay taping for a couple of minutes because you said you had to take it. You got on the phone and you said, “I’m doing a live taping with Preet Bharara. I can’t talk to you right now.” And then you said other things that made it seem like you have a new story coming. Are you going to reveal here on the show what that was about?

Jane Mayer:

I can’t do it on the show, but I can tell you that this has been the most extraordinary story. This is the story surrounding the confirmation battle of Brett Kavanaugh, and there are so many people calling with tips and people sending affidavits that they’ve sworn out and are giving to the FBI-

Preet Bharara:

But they also-

Jane Mayer:

My phone keeps ringing, and that was yet another lawyer with another affidavit that’s been submitted to the FBI in this case.

Preet Bharara:

And then they also call you?

Jane Mayer:

And then they call us, yes, because there’s a sense I think that the process may not be working fast enough or well enough, that there’s a certain kind of dysfunction surrounding this re-opened background investigation, and people feel the FBI is not listening to them. And so these are basically citizens who have information they think is important, and I’m not sure it always is, but in some cases, I think it probably is, who feel there’s no other channel to go to. They’re trying to get it to the Senate, they’re trying to get it to the FBI. And if that fails, they come to the media. So we’re kind of the place of last resort.

Preet Bharara:

Not always. Sometimes they come to your first, and some of your earlier stories have been things that I think law enforcement officials didn’t know about, right?

Jane Mayer:

That’s certainly true sometimes. And traditionally what happens with this kind of reporting is, the press will document something and then the Senate will hold hearings maybe and look into it. But this is a very compressed and fraught situation, and so people are feeling unusually urgent about it.

Preet Bharara:

That phone call you just got, how many times a day does that happen to you these days?

Jane Mayer:

That happens to me … It very rarely normally, but on this story it’s happened to me all day long for the last week and a half.

Preet Bharara:

So do we need to take a break midway through so you can check your phone and call someone back, or do you think we’ll be able to make it through 45 minutes?

Jane Mayer:

I think if they can’t wait 45 minutes, they’ll probably take it to some other news organization and I’ll just lose it that way. But anyway, I’m willing to run that risk in order to have a conversation with you.

Preet Bharara:

And the call you just got, you think it’s a credible claim?

Jane Mayer:

I know it’s a credible lawyer. I have to find out what’s in the affidavit and who swore it.

Preet Bharara:

Does that matter to you, that it’s a credible lawyer?

Jane Mayer:

Yeah. You’re in a vulnerable position as a reporter where people can try to send you false information, and there are very strong feelings on all sides of this confirmation battle. And probably one of the worst things that could happen would be to be snookered into printing something that’s a fake. And so yeah, you’ve got to be incredibly careful. You’ve got to make sure that the lawyer is legitimate, but also even more so, make sure that the affidavit is legitimate.

Preet Bharara:

Is Michael Avenatti a credible lawyer?

Jane Mayer:

I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t really know, and I have not dealt with Michael Avenatti that much. I find his grandstanding unnerving. I’m all about getting those facts out there, but don’t wreck someone’s reputation just with unfounded innuendo. I’m not saying he’s doing that. I haven’t looked into all of the details of his current client, Julie Swetnick. I’m not in a position to say she’s telling the truth or she’s not telling the truth. I think it’s impressive and important that she swore this out under threat of perjury. She may very well be telling the truth, but I feel it would’ve been smarter if her affidavit spoke instead of her lawyer going out there and going on national television, previewing it in this kind of Barnum and Bailey way.

Preet Bharara:

Right. Let’s take a step back. The Kavanaugh hearings, the re-opened hearings were last week. There was dramatic testimony a lot of people found credible, most people I think found credible, even those who support Brett Kavanaugh found credible by Dr. Ford. But then you worked on a different story with respect to a different allegation by someone named Deborah Ramirez. Just quickly summarize what that is for folks who may not be completely up to speed on it, because some things have happened in the last day that strike me as very troubling about those allegations and what Brett Kavanaugh knew about those allegations. So briefly, what’s the story with Ramirez?

Jane Mayer:

So the Ramirez story takes place the year after the Christine Blasey Ford allegation, and it’s an allegation made by a classmate of Brett Kavanaugh’s at Yale in the 1983-84 school year. And she recalls and spoke to us on the record about her recollection, which is of a sort of drunken dormitory party in which she was quite inebriated herself, but she remembers Brett Kavanaugh exposing himself to her, pushing his penis in her face, which forced her touch it to push him away. And she describes how she was brought up quite conservatively. She’s Catholic and had always hoped to postpone having any kind of sexual contact like that of any sort until she was married. And she felt humiliated. She felt embarrassed. She described hearing him laughing at her, and the other boys who were there laughing at her.

Jane Mayer:

And when we wrote the story, before we did, we tried to find as much corroboration as we could. And I think we found some pretty serious corroboration. We also tried to check out anyone who might suggest that she was lying. So we spoke to lots of different people who knew Deborah Ramirez, or people who might have thought she had a credibility problem or a political problem, and we found none of the above. Everybody we interviewed, including the people who were put forward by Brett Kavanaugh’s team who knew Deborah Ramirez said she’s a very truthful person.

Preet Bharara:

When you say we, you’re referring to yourself and?

Jane Mayer:

It’s not the royal we, which is … Mark Twain once said, “It’s either the royal we or I’m speaking in the we because I have worms.” It’s neither of those. It’s Ronan Farrow, who’s my co-author on this story. But when you see a story like that in The New Yorker, there’s another we also. There’s quite a process behind it that readers don’t get to see. There’s a team of people. So Ronan and I were doing the reporting, but in addition, there are fact checkers, there’s somebody who was on the phone for I think over two hours with Deborah Ramirez, going through every single fact with her and her lawyer. There are our lawyer, our in-house lawyer who’s going through it who’s fantastic. And a number of editors, everything from copy editors on up to the editor of the magazine, David Remnick. And we were conferring constantly on this story and doing everything we could to make sure that it was absolutely right, because we knew that it was incendiary.

Preet Bharara:

What was the timing of your first learning of the Ramirez allegations?

Jane Mayer:

It ran on the 23rd I think of September, so maybe two weeks before that.

Preet Bharara:

Two weeks before that. In the story, you and Ronan write that it took Deborah Ramirez a few days to think about whether or not, and I’m paraphrasing so correct me if I’m wrong because it’s your story, to think about whether or not she remembered it correctly. And I think the phrase, and it’s been used to criticize the story, was something like, she took six days to go over her recollection and consult with a lawyer, and after that time, she felt comfortable sticking by what she had said. Shouldn’t that give us a lot of pause about her story? What does that mean to spend six days going back over your recollection on something that happened 35 years ago?

Jane Mayer:

Well, that’s one way to look at it, and that is how critics have looked at it. I actually thought it showed her honesty. She was quite upfront, and we were quite upfront. I hope it showed our honesty in being very transparent about this process. I’m probably older than you, but when it comes to remembering something 35 years ago, I think I too would have to probably call my friends at the time and say, “Do you remember this? Did I say that, or did you say that?” Or, “Were you in the room?” I mean, to me, it seemed the most natural thing. And I thought it also was impressive that she cared so much. She didn’t just say, “Oh yeah, I remember this.” She wanted to be absolutely certain. She went through it. She confessed up front that she had been drinking, so she wasn’t entirely certain that her memories were as clear as she wanted them to be. And it was only after she’d gone through this process and conferred with others and talked it through with a lawyer that she finally felt that she was comfortable going on the record and telling this story.

Jane Mayer:

And to me, again, one of the things that was I think most important was that what she was saying is, I want the FBI to investigate this. I want to make a sworn statement on this. If my statement is wrong, I know that I would be committing perjury. And what that story really was about was saying, this is what’s going on right now. This is a snapshot. There’s this nomination moving forward, and a woman’s coming forward on the record, and she wants the FBI, and the Senate is looking at it and trying to investigate too. That is the state of play in that story.

Preet Bharara:

Did she come to you and Ronan and the press before she made any effort to go to the committee or the FBI?

Jane Mayer:

She actually did not come to us. We heard her name, and when we heard her name, we sought her out to try to see if she would speak to us. And Ronan convinced her to speak to him off the record. And eventually during that six day period, she became emboldened to go on the record.

Preet Bharara:

Does there come a point in the decision to publish the story about something like the Ramirez allegations, which are serious and have a great consequence for the country, is there a tipping point when the decision is made, now we have enough to publish? Because I think people are confused about what the line is when you find something credible, what you publish, when you publish. And also, is there … I know this is multiple questions. Is there something to beating the competition so that there’s some pressure if you have a story to put it out before the other guys do?

Jane Mayer:

There’s always journalistic competition, but that really has to be the least important pressure in your life. I mean, the most important pressure is finding the truth, being sure it’s true, and then deciding whether you’ve got enough documentation to feel that you can go public with it. And so in the Ramirez case, it was a hard call because we knew it was a devastating story and that it was an embarrassing story obviously for Kavanaugh and one that could really hurt his reputation. Nobody takes that lightly. So what goes into making a judgment call like that are all those people I talked to you about who were involved in the decision and a lot of information that the public never sees. Part of what was going on behind the scenes was, we knew who the background sources were who were talking to us, and we knew what their level of credibility was, where the public doesn’t get to see that. But our fact checkers speak to the background sources in addition to those who are on the record, and they too weigh in on it.

Jane Mayer:

And then there are other bits of information we have that maybe we aren’t able to put on the record, and that is true in this case. And so there’s a bigger picture that we have by the time that we go to press than the public is able to see.

Preet Bharara:

The problem with that is is the nature of things, but the problem with that is that the public has to then trust all this other stuff that you have that is not reported, that’s not in the article that gives you a basis for feeling confidence in the reporting.

Jane Mayer:

Maybe. I mean, but the thing is, you also … I mean, and that piece was extremely and kind of unusually transparent about the reporting process in that you had Deborah Ramirez, we describe how she gradually came forward and changed. And we also have lots of information in there from the Kavanaugh team, which shows you what questions they’ve got about her. And so the public has conflicting information in that story, and it doesn’t say necessarily she’s 100% right or that he’s 100% right. It’s the information that we had, and we’re sharing it with the public. By the time we went to press, we were absolutely certain it was the right story to tell. We had Deborah Ramirez on the record, talking about her firsthand experience, and we had no reason to doubt her credibility. And we had touched base with the White House and with the Kavanaugh team, and none of them gave us any reason to distrust her.

Preet Bharara:

I want to get to something that is kind of troubling that’s been in the news with respect to these allegations in the last day, and let me start by asking you this question. Do you have any understanding about when it is that the Kavanaugh people or the White House might have known about the Ramirez allegations, because you said that you folks at The New Yorker only learned about them, say, mid-September. Do you have any reason to believe that the Kavanaugh people were expecting this to come out at some earlier point?

Jane Mayer:

Well, of course Judge Kavanaugh in front of the Senate swore that he only learned about it from The New Yorker. So it’s a real problem for him if there’s information suggesting that he knew of it earlier.

Preet Bharara:

To be clear for folks who may not have read these reports, as we sit here today on Tuesday, I believe at some point yesterday, NBC reported there were apparently text messages from earlier in the year, I think in the July timeframe, between and among classmates of Brett Kavanaugh’s from Yale that suggest a concern about allegations by Ms. Ramirez.

Jane Mayer:

So I’ve seen the text messages in question here, and what they show is that there was friend of Brett Kavanaugh’s who was looking for a particular photograph, and that photograph features Deborah Ramirez and Brett Kavanaugh happily looking like they’re on friendly terms at a wedding 10 years after they graduated from Yale. It’s not clear from the text why the Kavanaugh camp was looking for this particular photograph. We need to know that. But if in fact they were looking for it in order to create some kind of cover story, I think that would be devastating. But it’s not absolutely clear at this point.

Preet Bharara:

So there are no texts that you’re aware of that show clearly that Brett Kavanaugh was trying to in advance build up a defense other than this photograph?

Jane Mayer:

What you can see is in advance of our story running by a day or two, they were scrambling, the Kavanaugh team that is. There are references to Brett and to Brett’s person, meaning somebody who’s working on his nomination team, trying to get classmates at Yale to go forward and cast aspersion on the Ramirez story. There’s one woman in particular, Karen Yarasavage, in these texts, and she’s talking with a friend, and she’s saying, “My story is that I was really good friends with Debbie Ramirez, and she never told me this.” And she then also mentions that she’s been asked by Kavanaugh’s group to go on the record and say this. So you can see that they’re preparing a defense before our story comes out. I actually am the person who spoke with Karen Yarasavage, I mean, so I was the reporter on the receiving end of these efforts.

Jane Mayer:

It is clear to me, I can confirm the Kavanaugh camp was putting forward character witnesses who were trying to poke holes in the Ramirez story and that they went from being on the background to calling back and saying they would like to be on the record, meaning they want to appear to be even stronger. And my sense was that it was Kavanaugh and his people who were trying to push these witnesses onto the record to talk about this. The interesting thing to me though as the person who was interviewing these character witnesses for Kavanaugh who were trying to challenge the credibility of Ramirez is that they were really weak in their arguments. I really did not interview anybody, even from his group, who could say or who wanted to say outright, that Ramirez was lying.

Jane Mayer:

And this was, again, important to why we published the story. Nobody said she’s a liar. Nobody said she’s doing this for political reasons. I asked, “Do you want to say she’s lying?” I gave them the opportunity, and they said, “No.” And I said, “Do you want to say you’re disputing her allegation?” And they said, “No.” So they were looking for someone to try to bring down her account, and they were actually unable to find anyone who was willing to do it, even on background, let alone on the record.

Preet Bharara:

Just to be clear, when you say Kavanaugh’s people, who are you referring to? You don’t mean lawyers who officially work for the White House or for the Justice Department who are normally the people you consider to be the nomination’s team.

Jane Mayer:

It was sort of his private posse I think-

Preet Bharara:

His private posse.

Jane Mayer:

His friends who were trying to help him get through this grueling nomination process. We did also talk, I have to say, to the White House, and it was the White House which said in the beginning, “Do you want to talk to anyone who might knock down your story?” And of course, as reporters, we’ll talk to everybody. We want to know. If there’s a flaw in the story, we want to know before we go to press. So we got the name of Karen Yarasavage and her phone number from the White House.

Preet Bharara:

On a scale of 1 to 10, how much pushback did you get on this story? And I assume that there are some times where people are screaming and threaten legal action, that’s a 10. And a 0 or a 1 is where they’re like, fine, go ahead, you’ve got it totally right. And then the second question is, does that factor in in any way in confirming the correctness of your story depending on where on the spectrum the pushback is or not?

Jane Mayer:

It’s really interesting, the reaction to this story, because the pushback from people supporting Kavanaugh has all been about whether we met journalistic standards. But I have yet to see any pushback that says that Deborah Ramirez is a liar. She’s gone to the FBI now. She’s given her account. The former Boulder district attorney who was her first lawyer in this said she was the most credible client he had seen in 35 years. People who are classmates who know her, classmates who are friends of Brett Kavanaugh’s who know her, nobody is saying this woman is a liar. So we’re not getting the pushback that you get if you’ve made a big mistake. Nothing like it. We’re just getting people who are unhappy we wrote the story.

Preet Bharara:

Although just to push back on that for a moment, in fairness, they don’t have to call her a liar, because there’s enough in the story if you want to argue this, given that she took six days to refresh her recollection, review her recollection, consult with a lawyer. It’s been a long time, so it may be the best way to refute it is not to cast aspersions on her as a liar, but to say, which I think they’ve been doing, she’s just wrong. She’s mistaken.

Jane Mayer:

The biggest issue really that’s been raised is, if this party took place and this behavior took place there, why are there no eyewitnesses willing to speak out about it? And I will say as somebody who did a lot of the reporting on the people who were at the party, that Deborah Ramirez has given us names of people she thinks were there, and we have gone to the ends of the earth to get ahold of them. And I will say that I think that the likelihood that his friends who were implicated in the same situation, the likelihood that they’re going to come forward and say, “Sure, I was there and he did this,” is always going to be very, very low. You’re not going to get people who were involved in some kind of scandalous behavior to come forward and say, “I was a participant in it. Let me tell you about it.” So it doesn’t strike me as surprising that basically what most of these people who have been named to be at the party did when we reached out to them was duck.

Jane Mayer:

Some of them have never returned phone calls, and others have said, “Gee, I just don’t remember that.” And what I think is really important to know now since we know a number of their names is, are they speaking to the FBI? Is the FBI speaking to them? Some of these people might say to a reporter, “Gee, I don’t remember,” but when the FBI knock on the door, the question is, do they say, “I just don’t want to talk.”

Preet Bharara:

And how many people did The New Yorker speak to who may have had knowledge about the party or were at the party?

Jane Mayer:

Somewhere about a half dozen I would think. It was a group of about a half dozen people that could’ve been there, that we believe were there, and we’ve probably spoken to between 50 and 100 people who were in position to know something about this.

Preet Bharara:

So let me ask you this question. If you spoke to that many folks as journalists to decide whether or not it was up to snuff to put in The New Yorker, and now the FBI has been given presumably authority to investigate this allegation, do you believe that they should do the same amount of work that you guys did before publishing an article?

Jane Mayer:

I think it would be good if they did, I really do. I mean, I think this is an incredibly important allegation as is Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation. This is a lifetime appointment we’re talking about on the most important court in our country. So I think the importance of getting it right is absolutely paramount to everything else. I don’t understand why any artificial time limits would be put on this. The consequences could scarcely be bigger, so they’d better be very right when they hand in a report. And it does take time. I mean, the one thing I know from investigative reporting is the one thing that makes the difference is time. It takes a while to find the right people to talk to and to talk to them enough that you feel that you’ve gotten the truth from them and to find any kind of documentary evidence that you can. It just takes time.

Preet Bharara:

Do you have a view on whether or not Brett Kavanaugh should be on the Supreme Court?

Jane Mayer:

I try not to even think like that. It’s just-

Preet Bharara:

You anticipated my next question. I was going to ask you, for a journalist, you or Ronan Farrow or anyone else, I mean, maybe you personally have a view, and you’re entitled to that, but how you keep that from infecting your reporting.

Jane Mayer:

It’s just the way a doctor or some other professional would deal with a situation. You just have to be professionally detached, and whether you want this person on the Court or not, if this person committed a sexual assault, even if they were your favorite candidate, you would still be beholden to the public to have to put that information out. And even if they’re your least favorite candidate and somebody’s making a false allegation, you would be beholden to get that information out. And I think the best way to illustrate how this is not a political job is that the last story that Ronan Farrow and I worked on prior to the Kavanaugh story was about Eric Schneiderman, the attorney general at the time of New York state. It would be hard to find a more outspoken critic of Donald Trump and someone more up to his eyeballs in the fight against Trump. So if this were political and we were just trying to help one side of politics and not the other, we would never have written that story, which resulted in Eric Schneiderman having to step down in two hours and 57 minutes from his job.

Preet Bharara:

Did you have a stopwatch?

Jane Mayer:

It was just-

Preet Bharara:

That’s very precise, Jane.

Jane Mayer:

It was so incredible. I was sitting there at the dining room table with my husband and my daughter and looking at our phones, and I thought he would probably have to resign. But I didn’t think it would happen quite that fast.

Preet Bharara:

Was that an easier publication decision, the story about Eric Scheiderman? And for the record, the story that you guys wrote, making clear that Eric Schneiderman had actually physically assaulted people with whom he’d had romantic relationships. Was that an easier story to go to press?

Jane Mayer:

It wasn’t an easy story. I don’t think … The thing is, none of these stories are easy. Among other things, there’s a feeling you have as a reporter, at least that I have, that you’re destroying somebody’s reputation, someone in public life, in both cases, on things that have to do with their private behavior. It’s not a fun thing to do. It feels like it’s a public service. I feel it’s important. But there’s not a sense of glee in doing these things, and it’s incredibly important to get it right. So none of these things are easy. You really have to be really certain.

Preet Bharara:

You’re not new to this kind of thing. You wrote a book, a very acclaimed book, about Clarence Thomas and the Anita Hill hearings. And lots of people who don’t remember history so well are drawing parallels. So why don’t I ask you, an expert who’s doing live reporting in the instant case, and also deeply reported what happened 27 years ago, what are the real parallels and where are the real differences between what happened then and what’s happening now?

Jane Mayer:

Well, so we don’t know the outcome yet. The big question is, will it come out differently in this particular case? Of course they’re not exactly identical. They’re different charges that had to do with sexual harassment. This has to do with sexual assault. One thing I should say right out front is as I was saying before, it takes time to really get to the bottom of a fight like this when both sides seem credible. And in the case of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, it took Jill Abramson, the former editor of The New York Times and a friend of mine since high school, and myself three years to get the story right. And even then, when we published Strange Justice, which came out in 1994, we said the preponderance of evidence appears to make it seem that Clarence Thomas lied. But you couldn’t say 100%. It was the preponderance of the evidence.

Jane Mayer:

And so in this case, we’re talking about something that’s happening in real time, unfolding really fast in a matter of days. And so it’s much harder at this point to know how this is going to come out, but there are a lot of parallels. For one thing, both Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford were reluctant witnesses. They didn’t want to come out in public. Their names were leaked, and they had to make a decision about whether to step forward into the limelight in what was sure to be a thankless forum. In the case, though, of Anita Hill, the FBI played actually a bigger role. They really did go and interview a number of people. Here, they had to be dragged in in a last minute compromise when the Democrats were up in arms over it and Senator Flake was confronted by two women in an elevator screaming at him. It took all of that to get the FBI in.

Preet Bharara:

But is there anything different today in the culture and in people’s understanding of sexual misconduct and harassment and assault, from your perspective both as a woman and as somebody who has written incredibly important pieces about Me Too allegations? Is there something different about the public mind now and awareness of these issues that you think will cause people to react differently than they did 27 years ago?

Jane Mayer:

There’s so much more social awareness of sexual harassment and sexual assault as issues, and women are so much more emboldened to come forward that one of the things that’s been interesting to me covering this is that first, you had Christine Blasey Ford, and she was kind of pushed out there. But then I had people who saw that and are coming forward saying, “I too want to speak about this.” So for instance, there was a former girlfriend of Mark Judge, who was the other man in the room supposedly, high school student in the room, when Christine Blasey Ford said she was assaulted by Brett Kavanaugh. He was there, and he had a girlfriend in college who reached out to me, and she said, “I can’t stand by and watch him lie. I want to come forward.” Other women feel, I’m not going to let Christine Blasey Ford just hang out there unsupported the way Anita Hill hung out there unsupported. I think that was part of Ramirez’s feeling about why she wanted to go on the record when she felt there’s more to this. It’s not just Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation. Other women felt, I’m going to speak up also.

Preet Bharara:

Who do you think’s more angry, the people who support Kavanaugh or the people who oppose Kavanaugh? Because we saw a lot of anger from Lindsay Graham and just seeing reports about what the fallout may be in the election. What’s your view, having covered these things for a long time, and by the way also noting in your book what happened after the Anita Hill hearings? It is true that Clarence Thomas got confirmed to the Supreme Court, and I think, I may have this wrong, but something like 11 Democratic senators voted for him. And a bunch of those folks got voted out of office the following year, including a Democratic senator from Illinois. So-

Jane Mayer:

Alan Dixon.

Preet Bharara:

Alan Dixon.

Jane Mayer:

That’s absolutely right, yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Who thought that they would avoid more fallout at home by sort of begrudgingly voting for Clarence Thomas, and he got defeated by Carol Moseley Braun, the first black woman to serve on the Judiciary Committee.

Jane Mayer:

That’s absolutely right. Many of the senators at the time of Anita Hill thought it was the easy vote, the safe vote, to just go ahead and confirm him. And the voters just took it out on them afterwards. There was just a wave of women who went to the polls and a number of women that were elected that year, including Dianne Feinstein, who’s now the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. So one of the things that’s also changed in this particular Court fight now is that it’s women’s votes in many ways in the Senate that are up in the air that both sides are fighting for. You’ve got Senator Collins from Maine and Senator Murkowski from Alaska, and those votes are the ones that are going to probably decide this, and they’re both women’s votes.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think if we had an equal number of men and women in the Senate distributed between the parties that this would even be a close vote?

Jane Mayer:

No.

Preet Bharara:

That’s interesting.

Jane Mayer:

In a word, I don’t. I think women … It’s been amazing to me how many women have come forward privately to me and said, “This happened to me too.” Things like that happen to them also. Women I work with, all kinds of women. Women understand what these women are saying.

Preet Bharara:

And what are they saying about the men who don’t seem to believe these allegations? Are they angry at them or disappointed?

Jane Mayer:

I mean, it’s not just women who are critical of the men like Lindsay Graham. I think there’s a sort of a certain theme that’s being propounded by the supporters of Kavanaugh that, oh, boys will be boys, and this is just how guys are, and really, what’s the problem? And I know a lot of men who’ve said to me, “That’s not how we are.” I’m married. I’ve dated many men beforehand. That’s not how the men I knew were or how my husband is. So that argument may fly with some people, but it sure doesn’t fly with a lot of women, and it also doesn’t fly with a lot of men. I’m not going on my own personal polling, which is only a handful of people who are friends and people I know. Look at the polls. The polls are really interesting. They show that first of all, Kavanaugh’s not a popular nominee to begin with. But he is absolutely opposed by a majority of particularly college educated women.

Preet Bharara:

So I have to ask this question, and maybe you get this and it’s an annoying question, but on several of these stories, they were not written by one person. They were written by you, and you’ve been an award-winning amazing investigative journalist for a long time. But they were written by you and Ronan Farrow. And in some corners, people have noticed when there’s been commentary on the reporting, sometimes people have mentioned Ronan and they fail to mention Jane. Do you notice that? Is there a reason for that? Does it bother you? Is there sexism at that? Are you mad at me for asking the question?

Jane Mayer:

I’ve noticed that my Twitter feed is filled with people saying, “Don’t forget Jane.” And the truth is, I hadn’t felt forgotten. So I feel highly celebrated and highly lucky to have this job, and actually very lucky to have Ronan. The two of us, it’s a change for The New Yorker. We didn’t have double bylines there until we’ve started doing more kind of breaking news for the web, and it’s been years since I’ve had somebody to work with. Jill Abramson and I, for instance, had worked together on a book and some other things, and Ronan’s fantastic to work with. I think it’s only natural. I mean, face it. He’s a star, he’s the child of movie stars. There’s a phenomenal amount of interest in him, and he just won the Pulitzer Prize, and he seems to have every other award you can think of from Rhodes Scholarship. And I was teasing him recently, I think he’s a bit of a slacker because I don’t think he’s … He has not won Wimbledon yet.

Preet Bharara:

Well, depends on what the chair up is like in order to win a Grand Slam event as we’ve discussed on this show. Can I ask an arcane question? How is it decided whose name goes first in the byline?

Jane Mayer:

So ordinarily what happens is, it’s alphabetical. Farrow’s name first and then Mayer. But then sometimes, one person’s done a lot more work than the other, and then they would reverse it, so every now and then. I think on the Schneiderman piece, my name came first because I’d written it and did an awful lot of reporting, though Ronan did very important reporting, very important reporting on it too. That would be the tip off.

Preet Bharara:

Jane, I want to thank you. We spent all this time talking about Kavanaugh, which I think is urgent, but we didn’t have time, because we don’t have enough, to talk about your reporting on dark money, on interference in the election, but I encourage everybody who’s listening to religiously read Jane Mayer, things she’s written in the past and everything you’ll write coming up. And you’ll let me know if that weird dramatic phone call that you took right before we started taping results in something-

Jane Mayer:

Okay, great.

Preet Bharara:

And then I can tell listeners.

Jane Mayer:

You’ll be the first to know.

Preet Bharara:

Okay, now you’re mocking me, but it’s okay.

Jane Mayer:

No. Thank you for having me. It was so much fun.