What sort of person would hire a low-life publicity hound like Michael Avenatti to represent her in a high-visibility complaint against a man she insists raped her 36 years ago? We know the answer to that question from yesterday’s report of a third accuser of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Her name is Julie Swetnick.
Today we know a little more about her thanks to an article posted last evening by Politico that reveals she was the target of a restraining order filed by a former boyfriend who claims Swetnick went ballistic after he broke up with her.
A Miami-Dade County court docket shows a petition for injunction against Swetnick was filed March 1, 2001, by her former boyfriend, Richard Vinneccy, who told POLITICO Wednesday the two had dated for four years before they broke up.
Thirteen days later, the case was dismissed, not long after an affidavit of non-ability to advance fees was filed.
According to Vinneccy, Swetnick threatened him after they broke up and even after he got married to his current wife and had a child.
“Right after I broke up with her, she was threatening my family, threatening my wife and threatening to do harm to my baby at that time,” Vinneccy said in a telephone interview with POLITICO. “I know a lot about her.”
Shades of the 1987 thriller “Fatal Attraction.”
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The authors of the column, Marc Caputo and Natasha Korecki, reached out as well to Avenatti, who claimed — unsurprisingly — that he knew nothing of the restraining order, adding:
“Complete nonsense. No truth to this at all. Her ex-boyfriend fraudulently used her resume to apply for and obtain jobs and was caught by her,” said Avenatti. “Why are you all attacking a sexual assault victim? Would that be appropriate in a court of law?
But this isn’t a court of law, even though Democrats continue to blur the line between a hearing and a trial. The stakes are certainly as high, as Ramesh Ponnuru points out:
Claims that Kavanaugh is merely being subjected to a job interview, not a criminal trial, are hard to take seriously. You would have to be blind not to see that a Kavanaugh withdrawal or defeat would be taken as a quasi-official verdict on the allegations against him. Kavanaugh would be disgraced. Even his existing judgeship would be insecure.
By the way, before anyone accuses the ex-boyfriend of playing politics, it’s worth noting that Vinneccy is a registered Democrat, according to Miami-Dade County voting records.
