Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz told "Fox & Friends" Friday that what is happening to Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh is a form of “sexual McCarthyism” that sets a “terrible precedent.”
“I mean the idea that he can’t teach at Harvard now because he was ‘suspected?'” Dershowitz said. “When I was growing up in Brooklyn College as a student, they fired professors because they were ‘suspected’ of maybe being communists when they were in their 20s. Suspicion was enough. This kind of sexual Mccarthyism is a terrible, terrible precedent.”
Kavanaugh will not be teaching a previously scheduled Harvard course in the winter term after he was faced with allegations of sexual misconduct from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.
Ford claims he groped her and attempted to rape her during a party in high school when he was drunk. Kavanaugh has fully denied these allegations and the witnesses Ford named have no recollection of such an incident.
Dershowitz also condemned efforts by Ford’s attorneys to delay the investigation by demanding that the FBI interview Ford after she already testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“I think the phoniest argument was that they didn’t interview her,” Dershowitz said. “She was under oath. She testified. FBI background checks don’t repeat what has happened previously. The two people who they didn’t have to interview were the people who testified. Their job was to find corroboration or lack of corroboration.”
“What would she do, change her testimony?” he asked. “She couldn’t help herself. She could only hurt herself if she changed her testimony.”
Dershowitz emphasized that while sexual assault is horrible, society needs to be honest about the fact that women do make up allegations as well.
“Look, women being assaulted is a horrible, horrible thing but women making up stories the way at least one witness may well have made up a story out of whole cloth, that’s a serious matter too and we have to look into all of these issues,” he said. “This is a teaching moment and I hope we learn the right thing from this teaching moment.”
Dershowitz was likely referencing the allegations made by Julie Swetnick, through her attorney Michael Avenatti, that Kavanaugh was part of a group of high school guys that spiked the punch at parties and gang raped girls.
During an NBC interview earlier this week, Swetnick walked back some of the accusations in her sworn statement against Kavanaugh, raising serious questions about her credibility.
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