Tina Fey celebrated Matt Damon’s mockery of Justice Brett Kavanaugh on Saturday Night Live as his fate on the Supreme Court hung in the balance due to an accusation sexual assault from Christine Blasey Ford.
Fey discussed Damon’s performance on History Talks when reflecting on how Saturday Night Live has covered current events over the years as America approaches its 250th anniversary.
“The show’s relationship to current events became a thinner and thinner veil,” Fey said, per Variety. “They said something, we said something back. They’d come over and go, ‘We want to be on [the show] too.’ It’s thrilling, and almost a scary thing, that something you say will be heard by the person in charge.”
When it came to her favorite political impersonations, Fey singled out Matt Damon’s portrayal of Kavanaugh.
“He came in and just played him so perfectly, it helped alleviate a frustration that many viewers of those hearings had,” Fey said. “It only works if it’s correct.”
For the first week of then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing, everything appeared business as usual. Despite some brief theatrics from certain Democrat senators, it seemed the judge would coast to his rightful place as President Donald Trump’s second nominee to the Supreme Court. That all took a dark, sinister turn on the Sunday of September 16, 2018, when the Washington Post published an allegation from psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford claiming that Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a high school party in the 1980s, to which his longtime friend, Mark Judge, served witness. Blasey Ford notably did not recall when said sexual assault occured. As the Post detailed at the time:
While his friend watched, she said, Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed on her back and groped her over her clothes, grinding his body against hers and clumsily attempting to pull off her one-piece bathing suit and the clothing she wore over it. When she tried to scream, she said, he put his hand over her mouth.
“I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” said Ford, now a 51-year-old research psychologist in northern California. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.”
Ford said she was able to escape when Kavanaugh’s friend and classmate at Georgetown Preparatory School, Mark Judge, jumped on top of them, sending all three tumbling. She said she ran from the room, briefly locked herself in a bathroom and then fled the house.
Ford could not recall where or when the party occurred or how she returned home that night. Even more significant, Ford’s childhood friend, Leland Ingraham Keyser, said she had no recollection of being at the party Ford described and even had no memory of ever meeting Brett Kavanaugh. Mark Judge also said he had no recollection of such a party, telling the FBI under oath that he never saw his friend Brett Kavanaugh assault anyone during their time together in high school.
“At its dark heart, this was a witness tampering and extortion operation,” Mark Judge told Breitbart News in 2023. “I got a phone call from California on September 14, 2018, threatening to extort me. They were dumb enough to leave a message. and I gave it to the FBI.”
“Leland Keyser said she was told nasty things could be said about her if she did not back up Ford,” he added at the time. “I don’t know if Ford was involved in that or if it was others, but that’s all this was. Forget about the yearbooks, the teen slang, the stuff about the 1980s. They did opposition research and then tried to extort me and tried to witness tamper. That’s what it was. For people looking to simplify the fall of 2018, it was, exactly as Brett said, a well-orchestrated political hit. It was a crime.”
As Mark Judge previously recalled to Breitbart News, the years since the hearing have been a difficult road for him, and he still suffers PTSD from the incident.
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