“Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?” That’s what Reagan’s former U.S. Labor secretary, Raymond Donovan, asked reporters back in 1987.
He’d just been completely acquitted of politically motivated corruption charges. Jurors had taken less than 10 hours to clear him. And all his co-defendants. Of every charge.
But he’d spent millions on lawyers. His company’s construction business had ground to a halt. Worst of all, his name was forever linked to charges of “fraud” and “grand larceny.”
Because you never really get your good name back. Not entirely.
My friend Chris Manion has recounted how he got targeted by political enemies while working for pro-life stalwart Sen. Jesse Helms. Manion was charged with national security leaks that could have sent him to prison for decades. The charges amounted to treason. None of them were true. But the media swarmed to his story like piranhas. When Congress cleared him, they lost interest. As the Washington Post ombudsman told him: “When you were accused, it was news but it wasn’t true. Now you’re cleared — that’s true, but it isn’t news.”
Brett Kavanaugh had his day in “court.” He was confirmed by a single vote to the highest court in the land. But half of America wallowed in the most lurid reports, which painted him as a rampant, violent, drunken serial gang-rapist—on the scantest and most vaporous of evidence. Or none at all. Those utterly false charges, and the totally unverified charge presented by Christine Blasey Ford, will continue to haunt him and his family. Indeed, Democratic Congressman Jerry Nadler has promised that if his party wins a majority on November 6, they will try to impeach Kavanaugh. (So … get out and vote, people!)
Now think how Mark Judge must feel. He’s not a friend of the Bush family. He doesn’t sit on our highest court. He never volunteered to be any part of this. But his life has been shattered as surely as Brett Kavanaugh’s. In fact, Judge’s wrenching memoir of teenage alcohol addiction was probably the source used by Democratic staffers to concoct most of the charges against Brett Kavanaugh.
Will the TV networks try to clear Mark Judge now? Of course not. So what does Mark Judge do now?
I know Mark and know he wants to avoid the media. Further, he believes that everyone involved in this debacle was used by politicians who had no concern for the effect of their actions.
The Democrats and the media have cast Judge onto the corpse heap of the politics of personal destruction. He has to go the rest of his life under the totally meritless shadow of hideous accusations —the worst you can throw at a man.
All for the “crime” of having gone to high school with someone the left wanted to keep off the Supreme Court.
Mark Judge deserves our help. What’s more, he needs it. As the crowdfunding site set up for him notes:
In September 2018, Mark Judge was unwillingly thrust into the national spotlight as part of the nomination and approval process for Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court of the United States. At that time, Judge, a writer whose work has appeared in Christianity Today and The Stream, was a cancer survivor and was dealing with significant health issues and medical bills.
Without following constitutional standards of due process and the presumption of innocence, Judge was tried in the court of public opinion and in the secular press. As with others involved, his privacy was violated. An allegation that should have been addressed in private became a public circus, causing suffering for all parties involved.
The vague and increasingly outrageous allegations against him and Justice Kavanaugh were weaponized by politicians and the press before being investigated by the FBI, which found the charges to be unsubstantiated. Unconscionable politicians and the mainstream media used the parties involved for their own political purposes. In their desperate attempt to destroy an innocent man’s life and block his appointment to the Supreme Court, they attempted to make a scandal out of Judge’s and Kavanaugh’s high school years; senators heckled and actually interrogated witnesses about high school slang from the early 1980’s. They also abandoned the need for evidence to corroborate unsubstantiated allegations….
Mark Judge does not wish to disparage anyone nor talk to the media about an episode that was traumatic and unfair for him and, indeed, everyone involved. Mark Judge simply wants to live a private life, take care of his weakened health, and pay his legal and personal bills.
By contributing funds to help Mark Judge pay his legal defense and other obligations, you can evidence your objection to the unfair processes in which he became unwillingly embroiled and thus permit him to rebuild his life.
I’m not swimming in cash, but I cannot begin to imagine how Mark Judge has suffered, and I’m outraged at this injustice. So I’ll be giving $500 to his fund today. I’m asking my friends to do the same. I hope you will join me, at whatever level of support you can afford.
Political forces desperate to keep the Supreme Court as a means of ruling America by decree showed how utterly ruthless they really are, and Judge was collateral damage. Spiritual forces hungry for the ongoing sacrifice of unborn children were perfectly happy to destroy an innocent adult Christian along the way. Don’t let them win.
John Zmirak is Senior Editor of The Stream, and co-author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration.
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