Opinions | We were Brett Kavanaugh’s drinking buddies. We don’t think he should be confirmed.

No one should be able to lie their way onto the Supreme Court.

© Melina Mara/The Washington Post Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Sept. 27 in Washington.

By Charles Ludington, Lynne Brookes, Elizabeth Swisher, The Washington Post

Charles Ludington, Lynne Brookes and Elizabeth Swisher attended Yale University from 1983 to 1987 with Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh.

We were college classmates and drinking buddies with Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh. In the past week, all threeof usdecided separately to respond to questions from the media regarding Brett’s honesty, or lack thereof. In each of our cases, it was his public statements during a Fox News TV interview and his sworn testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee that prompted us to speak out.

We each asserted that Brett lied to the Senate by stating, under oath, that he never drank to the point of forgetting what he was doing. We said, unequivocally, that each of us, on numerous occasions, had seen Brett stumbling drunk to the point that it would be impossible for him to state with any degree of certainty that he remembered everything that he did when drunk.

Since coming forward, we each have received numerous angry messages accusing us of attempting to ruin a man’s life because of his drunken antics as a college student. In fact, none of us condemned Brett for his frequent drunkenness. We drank too much in college as well. It is true that Brett acknowledged he sometimes drank “too many beers.” But he also stated that he never drank to the point of blacking out.

By coming forward, each of us has disrupted our own lives and those of our families. As well as navigating the intense media interest, including having news vans and reporters set up in front of the home of one of us, we have received large amounts of hate mail, including threats of violence. We have lost friendships. The work servers of one of us were hacked.

None of this is what we wanted, but we felt it our civic duty to speak the truth and say that Brett lied under oath while seeking to become a Supreme Court justice. That is our one and only message, but it is a significant one. For we each believe that telling the truth, no matter how difficult, is a moral obligation for our nation’s leaders. No one should be able to lie their way onto the Supreme Court. Honesty is the glue that holds together a society of laws. Lies are the solvent that dissolves those bonds.

All of us went to Yale, whose motto is “Lux et Veritas” (Light and Truth). Brett also belonged to a Yale senior secret society called Truth and Courage. We believe that Brett neither tells the former nor embodies the latter. For this reason, we believe that Brett Kavanaugh should not sit on the nation’s highest court.