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Accuser's Ex-Boyfriend: I Was Assaulted at Age 9, and I Don't Believe Her

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Things keep looking worse for Julie Swetnick.

The third, and arguably least believable, of the women to accuse Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault has had numerous doubts cast on her story.

In a Monday interview with NBC, Swetnick even cast doubt on the allegations herself with mistakes such as confusing Kavanaugh’s name with another man’s.

But a former Washington, D.C. weatherman who was involved in a relationship with Swetnick in the 1990s has a story that could hurt even more.

In a statement publicized in a Twitter post from Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, Dennis Ketterer, a former television meteorologist in the Washington area, said that in the course of the time he was extremely close to Swetnick, “Julie never said anything about being sexually assaulted, raped, gang-raped or having sex against her will.”

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“She never mentioned Brett Kavanaugh in any capacity,” Ketterer wrote.

In the letter, Ketterer described how he met Swetnick in a D.C. bar in 1993.

During that bar conversation, Ketterer’s statement said, Swetnick expressed an interest in having sex with more than one man at a time.

“I asked her if this was just a fantasy of hers. She responded that she first tried sex with multiple guys while in high school and still liked it from time-to-time. She brought it up because she wanted to know if I would be interested in that,” Ketterer said in his statement.

Although Ketterer was married, he and Swetnick developed a “physical” relationship, though it never progressed as far as sex, according to the statement. Swetnick, Ketterer wrote, was “very aggressive sexually.”

“I’m not implying I didn’t like her advances, I just wasn’t ready to make the jump,” he wrote. “It came to a head, so we talked about sex.”

During that conversation, Ketterer wrote, Swetnick said “she would like to have sex with more than one guy at a time … She wanted to know if that would be OK in our relationship.”

It wasn’t, Ketterer wrote.

“AIDS was a huge issue at the time. And I had children. Due to her directly having stated a penchant for group sex, I decided not to see her anymore. It put my head back on straight. It was the last conversation we had.”

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Ketterer wrote that the closest he came to contact with Swetnick after that was in 1996, when he ran in the Democratic primary for Congress in Maryland’s 8th District. (He lost, getting 26 percent of the vote, according to The Baltimore Sun.)

He wrote that he contacted Swetnick’s father, thinking that her looks, personality and “great smile” could help his campaign.

Swetnick’s father, he wrote, told him Swetnick had “problems” and wouldn’t be of use on a campaign. The father then hung up, Ketterer wrote.

That was the end of the relationship until Ketterer — now a Utah resident and Republican who does not support President Donald Trump, according to The Sun — felt moved to write the letter amid the Kavanaugh confirmation controversy, according to his statement.

Here is a professional resume video Ketterer posted on YouTube in 2011.

His statement about Swetnick — if it’s true — casts serious doubt on Swetnick’s Kavanaugh story. During their relationship, Ketterer claimed he never had a hint that there was the kind of trauma in Swetnick’s past that her claims about Kavanaugh would indicate now.

Remember, Swetnick and her attorney, Michael Avenatti, claim she “became aware” that Kavanaugh was part of a group that drugged and gang-raped women in the 1980s. She claimed she was one of the group’s victims.

Ketterer maintains Swetnick never mentioned such a thing.

Does this interview damage the credbility of the Swetnick story?

Whatever Swetnick does sexually is her own affair, of course. And Ketterer’s clearly romantic — if not sexual — involvement with her while he was married is nothing to be proud of, as his statement admitted. Whatever happened between them, though, would generally not be the public’s business.

But since Swetnick’s claims are aiming to scuttle a Supreme Court nomination for a man who by all accounts will make a fine justice on the high court, Americans are entitled to know something about the past of the woman making those claims.

That knowledge will help judge credibility of the claims. And to Ketterer, Swetnick’s claims apparently have no credibility at all.

Swetnick’s NBC interview might not have helped win over doubters. Even reporter Kate Snow, who did the interview with Swetnick over the weekend, told viewers  before it aired, “NBC News, for the record, has not been able to independently verify her claims. There are things she told us on camera that differ from her written statements last week.”

In his statement, Ketterer indicated he knows something about sexual abuse trauma, too.

“I know what it’s like to be sexually assaulted and not be believed,” he said in the statement. “I was 9 years old when it happened at the hands of my grandfather’s best friend.”

That’s no small thing to talk about publicly. And coming across as it does, from a man who spent a career in the media that was far different from the glare of the spotlight that’s surrounding the Kavanaugh confirmation story, it has an air of sincerity that Swetnick and her media-ambulance-chasing attorney Michael Avenatti will never have.

And will likely never deserve.

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Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He's been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He's been with Liftable Media since 2015. Largely a product of Catholic schools, who discovered Ayn Rand in college, Joe is a lifelong newspaperman who learned enough about the trade to be skeptical of every word ever written. He was also lucky enough to have a job that didn't need a printing press to do it.
Birthplace
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