Yesterday a woman named Christina King Miranda, who says she attended Holton Arms, knew both Kavanaugh and Judge, and was a year or two ahead of Christine Blasey Ford, insisted via posts on both Facebook and Twitter that while she didn’t witness the incident firsthand, it “was spoken about for days afterwards in school” at the time.
Well, tonight there’s another, very similar claim, this time coming from a man who claims to have attended Georgetown Prep himself:
Here’s the direct link to Ruyak’s post from 1:36pm on Wednesday.
Ruyak doesn’t specify exactly which years he attended Georgetown Prep (from his post, it sounds like he may have been there at a different time period than they were?), but that line near the end is the kicker:
“The story that this woman is telling is one that I know was repeated dozens of times in my 4 years at Prep.”
I went ahead and Googled “Mark Judge Gary Orr” as he recommended, and sure enough, it brought up this story at the right-wing Daily Caller written by Judge in 2011:
The night of January 26, I got an email from Georgetown Prep that reminded me why. Garrett Orr, a man who was a teacher of mine and is a former Jesuit, has just been arrested for sexual abuse. It’s the second time charges have been made against him. The first charge, which came in 2003, did not result in criminal charges. It did, however, cause some friction for people, both alumni and parents, who believed the charges. Fr. Orr was a well-loved theater teacher, and a lot of people did not want to believe it. Their treatment of people who thought there was indeed a problem there ranged from mild derision to outright hostility (whenever I wrote an article about the situation, I would inevitably get flamed in the comments by an anonymous Prep booster or two). Orr left the priesthood and the school. The new charges are from a student who was at the school in 1989, six years after I graduated.
...Shortly after my friend met my Prep friends, she urged me to write another book, or at least an essay, about how great Georgetown Prep is. The brilliant teachers, the friends, the fun, the intellectual rigor, the sports program — it could all fill a book. Georgetown Prep did indeed do something, does something, right. But in the 1960s, liberalism became dominant, a wave that was still cresting when I was there in the 1980s. And now we know that kids got hurt. And today all I feel is sad.
In addition, both Kavanaugh and especially Judge’s yearbook entries are...disturbing, to say the least:
UPDATE: Someone pointed out that the wording of his “repeated dozens of times” sentence could be referring more generally to a culture of sexual assault of other girls by students at Prep (which sure sounds likely as well), as opposed to this specific incident with Ford.
I’ve asked Mr. Ruyak to clarify in the comments on his FB post.
On the other hand, a couple of hours after posting his original comment, he posted this:
UPDATE x2: Thanks to smari006 and Laurence Lewis below for finding this Washington Post article which confirms Ruyak’s story about being one of Orr’s victims...but also states that it happened in 2002, nearly 20 years after the alleged Ford/Kavanaugh incident. Also noteworthy: Ruyak’s father was on Georgetown Prep’s board of trustees for 13 years.
This strongly suggests that “repeated dozens of times” refers to a general rape culture at Georgetown (which of course is disturbing itself), as opposed to Ford’s specific story, although it’s possible that he could be referring to both:
Eric Ruyak, who was groped by Orr in 2002, and his father said in interviews that they were disappointed with how certain officials at the school reacted when he came forward. The Washington Post does not typically identify abuse victims, but Ruyak agreed to be identified.
“They were not interested in dealing with Orr,” Eric Ruyak said. “They wanted it to go away.”
His father, Robert Ruyak, who served on Georgetown Prep’s board of trustees from 1994 to 2007, said certain school officials, namely two teachers, conspired to paint his son as a rumor-spreading liar.
“They tried to get him expelled from school. It was absolutely ridiculous,” Robert Ruyak said, stressing that he still supports Georgetown Prep as an institution.
UPDATE x3: Sure enough, Mr. Ruyak has edited his Facebook post with the following clarification:
EDIT: For clarity (as I did not intend this off the cuff inditement of Judge's character to go viral in this manner) - I went to Prep from 2000 - 2004 and I am not a contemporary of Judge's or Kavanaugh's, and what I meant with regards to "the story that this woman is telling" was that stories such as hers were rampant at that high school - I was not referring to her story specifically. I simply meant to share my experience with Judge and with Prep.
Fair enough. This still adds to the growing evidence that Georgetown Prep has a widespread rape-friendly culture (or at least did, for decades).