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PARK CITY, UTAH — “We’re getting more tips,” Amy Herdy announced Friday night after the Sundance Film Festival premiere of “Justice,” a documentary she is making about the sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett M .Kavanaugh, had produced.
The film’s existence came as a surprise as the festival only revealed on Thursday, its opening night, that it would be making a last-minute addition to the programme: the first ever documentary from ‘Swingers’ and ‘The Bourne Identity’ director Doug Liman. Within a half hour of the news breaking, Liman said in the post-screening Q&A, the film crew began hearing from people who had sent tips to the FBI prior to Kavanaugh’s confirmation, which the agency did not investigate further.
What had ended suddenly began again. The tips were convincing enough for the team to begin investigating and filming again, with plans to add footage to the finished film, Liman said. In a wild and rare move, the finished documentary was turned back into a work in progress.
“I thought I was off the hook,” said Liman, who self-financed the film to maintain independence and keep it a secret. “I said, ‘We’re in Sundance. I could sell the movie.” … And yesterday Amy said, ‘We’re not done yet.’ Serious. They’ll be back on Monday morning.”
The film, Liman said in a press release, is set to “[pick] Where the FBI investigation into Brett M. Kavanaugh fell short,” debuted to a packed house of nearly 300 people. Someone asked if he would show Kavanaugh. The answer was a joking yes. “We’re looking for buyers,” Liman said, “and it had occurred to us that he might buy it.”
The fall 2018 judicial confirmation process, which took place just before the midterm elections, turned chaotic when Palo Alto-based psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford accused the Trump nominee of sexually assaulting her when they were in high school. After The Washington Post ran Ford’s story, and two other women accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault.
Deborah Ramirez, one of those women, told The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer that Kavanaugh thrust his penis in her face during a party when 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 her story. The FBI investigation into Kavanaugh turned up 4,500 leads, most of which went uninvestigated.
After reviewing a week-long FBI report that Democrats called rushed and incomplete, the Trump White House said it had found no corroboration of the allegations against the judiciary. Kavanaugh, who was part of the conservative 6-3 majority that saw Roe v. Wade has categorically denied all allegations and does not appear in the film outside of archival footage. The Supreme Court’s Public Information Office did not respond to the Post’s request for comment on the documentary.
Liman told the Sundance audience he started thinking about doing this film in 2018 when he was watching the hearings and “knew something very wrong was happening.”
After all, the director grew up with the law. His father, Arthur L. Liman, was chief counsel in the Senate investigation into the Iran-Contra affair and helped direct the investigation into the Attica prison riot. Doug Liman’s older brother, Lewis, is a federal judge in the Southern District of New York.
Liman and Herdy, an investigative journalist who made 2015 Sexual assault documentary “The Hunting Ground” preserved her Kavanaugh investigative secret for a year by using it Non-disclosure agreements – an impressive achievement in the small world of documentary film.
Liman mixes archive footage with testimony from Ramirez, Ford’s friends and Kavanaugh’s Yale classmates, who said Justice was often heavily intoxicated, but the film felt unfinished. (Variety called it “a preaching practice for the choir.”) A powerful moment, however, reveals a previously unheard recording of a tip to the FBI about another accuser.
We learned that at the premiere.
The film is about Ramirez, not Ford
Liman gives Ramirez the public platform she never got before the Senate. A long, emotional interview with Kavanaugh’s Boulder-based former Yale classmate forms the backbone of the film. While there’s not much in the interview that hasn’t already been reported, it’s powerful to hear someone who doesn’t enjoy being in the spotlight tell their own story, with all the agonizing starts and stops that come with trying to to remember a nearly 40-year traumatic event.
Ramirez opens up about her Catholic upbringing and her early desire to become a nun. She also talks about coming to Yale in 1983 as the shy, half-Puerto-Rican daughter of non-college parents, trying to fit into the predominantly wealthy, white, male institution that only started fifteen years ago to take in women. She details how she got drunk at a party and looked up to find a penis in her face, which – having never touched a penis before – she accidentally brushed her hand. All her friends started laughing at her.
She had blocked the memory, but when Farrow interviewed her, she said details had surfaced and she was certain Kavanaugh was her attacker.
“The outstanding memory is the laughter,” she says in the documentary, echoing what Ford said in her statement. “I have never forgotten that in 35 years.”
Ford appears almost exclusively in archival footage
The film starts out rather oddly with the camera on Liman sitting on a white couch while a blond woman asks why he would want to get involved in such an argument. The audience only sees the back of Ford’s head at this moment, just after the opening a little more of her at her sons’ basketball game.
Otherwise, she can only be seen in recordings of her hearing
Instead, her close friends tell her story. One says Ford told him about the attack on Kavanaugh without naming him in 2015, when Stanford University swimmer Brock Turner received a light sentence after being convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious student, Chanel Miller .
Liman said in the Q&A that he felt Ford didn’t need to be interviewed again after being exposed all on the national stage. He preferred to rotate the camera and allow her to ask some questions.
“I felt that Dr. Ford gave so much to this country,” he said. “She’s done enough for 10 lives.”
The FBI failed to investigate at least one credible allegation
If there’s a smoking gun in Liman’s film, it’s a voice message left on the FBI tipline by Max Stier, the president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, who was at Yale with Kavanagh and Ramirez.
In the previously unheard recording, Stier says classmates not only told him that Kavanaugh stuck his penis in Ramirez’s face, but that Kavanaugh then went to the bathroom to sit up before allegedly returning to attack them again, hoping to amuse a mutual audience friends. In the film, Ramirez says she repressed the memory so much that she couldn’t recall that second incident, even when Farrow specifically asked her about it.
Stier’s message to the FBI also cites another incident involving another woman that he witnessed “firsthand”: A heavily intoxicated Kavanaugh, his dorm roommate, pulled down his pants at another party while a group of football players played a drunk woman forced freshman to hold his penis.
Friends of the woman told the New York Times in 2019 that she did not remember the incident and did not want to come forward after seeing Ford’s treatment. Bull doesn’t appear in the film to elaborate, nor did he give any further interviews when his tip first surfaced in 2019.
The filmmakers announced this to the audience on Friday that they have a website, JusticeFilm.com, where people can submit tips.
“I hope this triggers action,” Herdy said. “I hope this will trigger additional investigations with real subpoena powers.