My house could be home of Kavanaugh party

Turns out my Washington home may have hosted the party where Brett Kavanaugh is alleged to have sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford.

Top left, Washington correspondent Cameron Stewart’s home where the 1982 party may have been held at which a young Brett Kavanaugh, bottom left, is accused of sexually assaulting Christine Blasey Ford.

In Donald Trump’s Washington, news stories are not hard to find, in fact some come straight to your door. And so it was yesterday when a woman from the investigative unit of America’s ABC News knocked on the door of myhome in Washington.

“Excuse me, we are investigating if your house could have been where the Brett Kavanaugh party was held,” she said, referring to the alleged party in the summer of 1982 where the Supreme Court nominee is alleged to have sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford.

The home already has a degree of local fame attached to it — the previous tenant was Vice-President Mike Pence and it was once the home of baseball legend Joe Judge. And now ABC News was telling me our home was on its “shortlist” of possible sites where the Kavanaugh-Ford confrontation took place, if it ever did.

It turns out that house was once the home of the grandparents of Mark Judge, the boy who Ford says was in the room with her when Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her.

“I remember him well, the little boy Mark used to come over and play in the backyard,” says 91- year-old Gloria Meade who has lived next door for 64 years.

In 1982, Mark’s grandmother Anita lived there alone after her husband, Joe, died from a heart attack while shovelling snow in the driveway. It was conceivable, the woman from ABC said, that when Judge was 17 in 1982 he used his grandmother’s home to host the gathering. After all, it is only 2km from the Columbia Country Club where Ford says she was swimming that day before the party.

Brett Kavanaugh in his high school yearbook

But does the floorplan match the vague descriptions given by Ford, who cannot remember where the party was held?

The party house was in “the Bethesda area” is all that Ford says of the location. Tick. It had a narrow staircase leading up to a bathroom with a bedroom off the side. Tick. An exit that would have required her to walk past those at the party. Tick. And a connection with Judge, and by extension, possibly Kavanaugh. Tick. Judge, 53, says no such party happened.

The woman from ABC News was intrigued by how the floorplan was consistent with Ford’s description so she videoed the stairs, the bedroom and the bathroom before taking it back to her newsroom to compare it with other houses on the shortlist. The house sits in a leafy part of a suburb called Chevy Chase that straddles the northwest corner of Washington and into Maryland. The suburb was a playground of Kavanaugh and his friends during high school and college. The then family home of one of Kavanaugh’s friends at the time, Chris Garrett, is 600m down the road.

Mark Judge in his 1983 year book

A neighbour, Dave, went to school with Kavanaugh and remembers him as party boy but saw nothing to suggest anything darker. Dave texted yesterday after having seen someone else online link this house with the 1982 party. “Hey guys (someone is) trying to connect your house to Mark Judge and possibly the scene of the attack. Look out for loonies and the FBI,” he said.

But our neighbours are not so sure our home will somehow unlock a dark secret that might determine Kavanaugh’s future and the ideological balance of the Supreme Court.

“She was a nasty, grumpy old lady,” says Meade about Anita Judge, who died in 2002 aged 82. “She wouldn’t have let teenagers have a party in her house.

“But maybe she was away that day,” I suggest.

“She didn’t even bother to put her false teeth in her mouth, much less go away for the weekend,” Meade says. “No, I really don’t think that party happened in your house.”

Cameron Stewart is also US contributor for Sky News Australia