Over the weekend, Chad Ludington, a college professor, said that he would deliver a statement to the FBI field office in Raleigh, North Carolina, claiming that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh lied when he testified before Congress that he was not a heavy drinker.
Who is Chad Ludington?
Charles “Chad” Ludington, 53, is an associate professor of history at North Carolina State University. He was a classmate of Brett Kavanaugh’s at Yale University and said he often drank with him. Ludington played basketball at Yale (and later, professionally in Europe) and said that athletes comprised much of Kavanaugh’s social circle.
Kavanaugh’s drinking habits figure prominently in the sexual-assault allegations levied against him by Christine Blasey Ford and Deborah Ramirez. Ford, who testified before Congress last Thursday, said Kavanaugh assaulted her during a drunken high-school party in the ’80s. Ramirez said Kavanaugh exposed himself to her while drinking at a dorm party at Yale.
When asked on Fox News last Sunday and by members of Congress, Kavanaugh denied ever becoming heavily intoxicated or blacking out from drinking.
In his statement, which the New York Times published on Saturday, Ludington said those assertions were false. “In recent days I have become deeply troubled by what has been a blatant mischaracterization by Brett himself of his drinking at Yale,” he wrote. “When I watched Brett and his wife being interviewed on Fox News on Monday, and when I watched Brett deliver his testimony under oath to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, I cringed. For the fact is, at Yale, and I can speak to no other times, Brett was a frequent drinker, and a heavy drinker.”
Ludington added: “I know, because, especially in our first two years of college, I often drank with him. On many occasions I heard Brett slur his words and saw him staggering from alcohol consumption, not all of which was beer. When Brett got drunk, he was often belligerent and aggressive. On one of the last occasions I purposely socialized with Brett, I witnessed him respond to a semi-hostile remark, not by defusing the situation, but by throwing his beer in the man’s face and starting a fight that ended with one of our mutual friends in jail.”
Ludington said he felt it was his civic duty to speak up and that he had no desire to speak further to the media.
More about Chad Ludington
Ludington graduated from Yale with a bachelor’s degree in history in 1987. He earned a doctorate in philosophy and history from Columbia in 2003 and began teaching at North Carolina State in 2004. His specialty is Northern European history. Ludington has been published in several academic journals and has written three books: “The Politics of Wine in Britain: A New Cultural History” (2013), “A Long Shadow: The Story of an Ulster-Irish Family” (2016) and “Food Fights: How the Past Matters in Contemporary Food Debates” (2018).
