Montgomery County records from the 1980s aren’t digitized. Remember microfiche?
J ulie Swetnick, who last week accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of drugging and gang-raping multiple women and girls at parties during his high school days at Georgetown Prep, told NBC on Monday that she filed a police report the day after she was allegedly drugged and raped herself. NBC said they filed a request with the Montgomery County Police Department, but were told such a search would take up to 30 days.
Why such a delay? Montgomery County police told THE WEEKLY STANDARD that their police report archives from the 1980s aren’t digitized—they’re recorded on microfiche, microscopic scans of documents that require a special magnifying machine to access and read. While microfiche was a godsend space-saver for organizations that needed to keep meticulous physical records in the pre-Internet age, it can be labor-intensive to use, particularly if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for. And the vagueness of Swetnick’s story means there’s actual years of reports they need to look through.
“If we don’t have a specific day, location, something like that, it could be a very extensive search,” Officer Rick Goodale told TWS. “I believe this morning I heard it could be anywhere from ’81 to ’83. You’re potentially looking at three years of an entire county’s worth of police reports you’d have to search through to see if we can find Miss Swetnick’s name or Judge Kavanaugh’s name in any police report.”
Swetnick has said the attack took place when she was 19, but has not herself elaborated further.
Swetnick’s accusation against Kavanaugh has come under increased scrutiny since she unexpectedly backed off from some of the most salacious claims Monday. In her initial allegation, made in a sworn affadivit and released through her attorney Michael Avenatti last Wednesday, she claimed direct knowledge that Kavanaugh had run an operation to “spike the punch at house parties I attended with drugs and gain alcohol so as to cause girls to lose their inhibitions and the ability to say ‘no’” and “cause girls to become inebriated and disoriented so they could then be ‘gang raped’ in a side room or bedroom by a ‘train’ of numerous boys.’”
But on Monday, Swetnick claimed only that she saw Kavanaugh “giving red solo cups to quite a few girls” at parties and “saw him around the punch.” On the night she was raped, she said, Kavanaugh was “hanging about the area where I started to feel disoriented.” Later on Monday, Avenatti, who is also representing porn star Stormy Daniels in her lawsuit against President Donald Trump and is considered a 2020 Democratic presidential contender, insisted one of Swetnick’s friends had told her she had seen Kavanaugh spiking the punch.
Swetnick said in her interview Monday that „everybody in the county remembers those parties“ where people where women were routinely gang-raped, but the Wall Street Journal has reported that the paper „has attempted to corroborate Ms. Swetnick’s account, contacting dozens of former classmates and colleagues, but could not reach anyone with knowledge of her allegations. No friends have come forward to publicly support her claims.“ NBC News reported that Swetnick provided four names of friends who attended the parties, but one person was deceased, one did not know a Julie Swetnick, and the two others have not replied to requests for comment.
Despite the fact that the officer Swetnick alleges she told about her rape is now dead, Montgomery County police have indicated they are performing the requested laborious search for the police report.
“As each request was received, it’s processed and will be handled in accordance with Maryland law and our preestablished protocol,” Captain Paul Starks told TWS. “If we were to come up with anything at any time that anyone requests, because our records department gets requests daily about all kinds of different things, we relinquish or submit that to the requester as we get it.”
