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Takeaways from Doug Liman’s secret Brett Kavanaugh documentary at Sundance

January 22, 2023

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PARK CITY, UTAH – “We’re getting more advice,” Amy Herdy announced Friday night after the Sundance Film Festival premiere of “Justice,” a documentary she produced about the sexual assault allegations against the judge. of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.

The film’s existence came as a surprise, with the festival only revealing at its opening night on Thursday that it was making a very Last-minute addition to the lineup: the first documentary from “Swingers” and “The Bourne Identity” director Doug Liman. Less than half an hour after the news aired, Liman said in the post-screening Q&A, the film’s crew began hearing from people who had sent advice to the FBI before Kavanaugh’s confirmation, which the agency did not investigate further.

Suddenly, what was over was beginning again. The advice was compelling enough to get the team back to investigating and filming with plans to add footage to the finished film, Liman said. In a wild and rare move, the finished documentary had turned back into a work in progress.

“I thought I was off the hook,” said Liman, who self-financed the film to maintain its independence and keep it under wraps. “I was like, ‘We’re at Sundance. I could sell the movie. … And yesterday Amy is like, ‘We’re not done.’ Seriously, Monday morning, they’ll get back to it.

The film, which Liman said in a press release, is supposed to “[pick] where the FBI’s investigation of Brett M. Kavanaugh failed horribly,” debuted to a packed house of nearly 300 people. Someone asked if he would show it to Kavanaugh. The answer was a joking yes. “We are looking for buyers,” Liman said, “and it had occurred to us that he might buy it.”

The fall 2018 justice confirmation process, which took place just before the midterm elections, turned chaotic when Palo Alto psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford accused Trump’s nominee of the sexually assaulted while in high school. After The Washington Post published Ford’s story, two other women accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault.

Deborah Ramirez, one of those women, told Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer of The New Yorker that Kavanaugh shoved his penis in her face at a party while they were at Yale University. The FBI interviewed Ramirez, whose attorneys said the bureau never followed up on any of the 20 witnesses who could have corroborated his story. The FBI’s investigation of Kavanaugh generated 4,500 pieces of information that largely went uninvestigated.

After reviewing an FBI report compiled over a week that Democrats called rushed and incomplete, the Trump White House said it found no support for the allegations against the judiciary. Kavanaugh, who was part of the 6-3 Tory majority that toppled Roe vs. Wade, has flatly denied all charges and does not appear in the film outside of archive footage. The Supreme Court’s public information office did not return the Post’s request for comment on the documentary.

Liman told audiences at Sundance that he first started thinking about making the movie in 2018 while watching the ratings and “knowing something very wrong was going on.”

After all, the director grew up around the law. Her father, Arthur L. Liman, was the lead counsel for the Senate Iran-Contra investigation and helped lead the investigation into the Attica prison uprising. Doug Liman’s older brother, Lewis, is a federal judge in the Southern District of New York.

Liman and Herdy, an investigative reporter who made the 2015 sexual assault documentary “The Hunting Ground”, preserved their secret investigation of Kavanaugh for a year using non-disclosure agreements – an impressive feat in the small world of documentary film.

Liman interweaves archival footage with testimony from Ramirez, Ford’s friends and Kavanaugh’s Yale classmates who said Justice was often seriously drunk, but the film appears unfinished. (The variety called it “an exercise in choir preaching”.) However, a powerful moment reveals a never-before-seen recording of a tip to the FBI regarding another accuser.

Here’s what we learned during the premiere.

The film is centered on Ramirez, not Ford

Liman gives Ramirez the public platform she never had before the Senate. A long and moving interview with Kavanaugh’s former Boulder-based Yale schoolmate forms the backbone of the film. While there isn’t much in the interview that hasn’t been reported yet, it’s powerful to hear someone who doesn’t like being in the spotlight tell their own story with all the angsty starts and stops that accompany the attempt to remember someone close to 40 years old. traumatic event less than a year old.

Ramirez talks about her Catholic upbringing and her early desire to be a nun. She also talks about entering Yale in 1983 as a shy, half-Puerto Rican daughter of parents who didn’t go to college and trying to fit into the predominantly affluent white male institution that didn’t go to college. only started admitting women fifteen years ago. She recounts in detail how she got drunk at a party and looked up to find a penis on her face, which she accidentally brushed with her hand – having never touched a penis before. All her friends started making fun of her.

She had blocked out the memory, but when Farrow interviewed her, she says details surfaced and she is certain Kavanaugh was her attacker.

“The most important memory is laughter,” she says in the documentary, echoing what Ford said in her testimony. “I have never forgotten it in 35 years.”

Ford appears almost entirely in archive footage

The film opens, oddly enough, with the camera trained on Liman sitting on a white sofa, as a blonde woman asks why he would want to get into something so controversial. The audience only sees the back of Ford’s head then, and then a bit more of her at her sons’ basketball game right after the opener.

Otherwise, she is only seen in the footage of her audition

Instead, her close friends tell her story. One says Ford told him about the assault on Kavanaugh without naming him in 2015, when Stanford University swimmer Brock Turner received a lenient sentence after being convicted of sexual assault on a oblivious student, Chanel Miller.

Liman said in the Q&A that he felt Ford didn’t need to be subjected to another interview after revealing everything on the national stage. He preferred to turn the camera and allow her to ask a few questions.

“I felt that Dr. Ford had given so much to this country,” he said. “She’s done enough for 10 lives.”

The FBI did not investigate at least one credible charge

If there’s a smoking gun in Liman’s film, it’s a voicemail left on the FBI’s tip line by Max Stier, the president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service who attended Yale. with Kavanagh and Ramirez.

In the never-before-seen recording, Stier says his classmates told him not only that Kavanaugh stuck his penis in Ramirez’s face, but then Kavanaugh went to the bathroom to get his erection before coming back to assault him. again, hoping to entertain an audience of mutual exchanges. friends. In the film, Ramirez says she had suppressed her memory so deeply that she could not remember this second incident, even when Farrow explicitly asked her about it.

Stier’s message to the FBI also cites another incident involving another woman, which he says he witnessed “first hand”: a severely drunk Kavanaugh, his dorm mate, pulling down his pants at another party while a group of footballers were forcing a drunk female freshman to hold his penis.

The woman’s friends told The New York Times in 2019 that she had no recollection of the incident and did not want to come forward after seeing Ford’s treatment. Stier does not appear in the film to elaborate and did not give further interviews when his advice first surfaced in 2019.

The filmmakers told the audience on Friday that they have a website, JusticeFilm.com, where people can post advice.

“Hopefully this will trigger some action,” Herdy said. “Hopefully this will trigger an additional investigation with real subpoena powers.