Kavanaugh's 2nd accuser never sought spotlight, friends say
BOULDER, Colo. - Between shifts ladling hot meals at the dining hall, Deborah Ramirez did her best to fit in with the blue-blooded social set of Yale University in the 1980s. She took a chartered flight to the Bahamas sophomore year with dozens of other spring breakers and attended booze-filled parties on campus with private-school grads.
What she says happened at one of those gatherings inside Yale's brick dormitory walls has pulled her from a life as an advocate for needy families and domestic violence survivors to the center of the battle over the shape of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Friends said Ramirez rarely talked about her college days and lived a private life in the Rocky Mountains foothills. But colleagues said they sensed something in her past had drawn her to devote her life to supporting women in trouble.
"I definitely had known she went to Yale and I knew that it wasn't always an easy experience for her," said Angela Hardin, who became close friends with Ramirez as they trained women's crisis volunteers a decade ago. "Debbie would talk about feeling various levels of discrimination."
Still, friends and colleagues said it came as a surprise when Ramirez decided to go public with allegations that while in his first year at Yale, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh placed his penis in front of her and caused her to involuntarily touch it during a drunken dormitory party. Kavanaugh denied the accusation soon after it was reported Sunday by The New Yorker magazine.
The magazine said that when it first contacted her, Ramirez was "hesitant to speak publicly, partly because her memories contained gaps because she had been drinking at the time of the alleged incident." After six days of going over her memories and talking with a lawyer, the magazine reported, Ramirez "said that she felt confident enough of her recollections" to name Kavanaugh as the student who had exposed himself to her at the party.
President Donald Trump told reporters Wednesday at the United Nations that Kavanaugh was "an absolute gem" and that Democrats are playing "a con game. ... That's what they play and that's about the only thing they do well."
He said Republicans "could not be nicer, could not be more respectful to the process, certainly could not be more respectful to the woman, and I'm OK with that. I think I might have pushed it forward a lot faster."
Kavanaugh was set to testify Thursday at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing along with Christine Blasey Ford, a California professor who has accused him of sexually assaulting her when they were both teenagers during an early 1980s high school party.
Ramirez's attorney, John Clune, said Wednesday his client would be willing to testify, but no one has asked her yet. "At this point, it's a moot point," he said on NBC's "Today" show.
He also said that she would like an FBI investigation, and it's not clear whether she'd agree to testify without one.
"I would let her make that decision," Clune said. "I would be concerned about her doing that without an investigation."
A committee spokesman, Taylor Foy, said that before it considers an investigation, it generally first receives a statement from someone making an accusation against a nominee or other offer of evidence - neither of which has been the case with Ramirez.
Clune did not respond to a request from The Associated Press for an interview with Ramirez.
Hardin, who spoke with Ramirez on Sunday night, said her friend reluctantly decided to tell her story so that her own words would be shared, rather than having them filter out through others.
"The fact that she brought her story forward tells me that she had to have gone through a lot of introspection," said Lisa Calderon, Ramirez's former supervisor at a Boulder nonprofit that assists survivors of domestic violence. "Bringing in what she went through would have been in some ways compromising boundaries because she always felt it wasn't about her. ... She had a passion for social justice, helping people, particularly women of color whose voices tended to not be heard."
Ramirez, who grew up Catholic in Connecticut, attended a co-ed, parochial high school in Trumbull and graduated from nearby Yale in New Haven with a degree in sociology in 1987.
Classmates described Ramirez, 53, as friendly, well-liked and quiet. Some of her closest friends were athletes and she made extra cash by working in the dining hall at her residential college, serving food and washing dishes, classmates said.
"She was not someone to want to be in the spotlight," said Julie Heller, who was a year behind and lived in her residential college.
She spent her spring break in 1985 with a large group of students in the Bahamas, where they partied, searched for the cheapest drinks, lounged on the beach and tried their luck at the casino, according to a Yale Daily News article from the time.
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