A column that Senator Cory Booker wrote for a Stanford university newspaper 26 years ago in which he admitted to groping a female’s breast when he was a teenager has resurfaced.
The decades-old column re-emerged this week given the controversy surrounding President Trump’s U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and the allegations from a woman that he sexually assaulted her in high school.
Booker, a possible White House contender, has been among those calling for an FBI investigation into the assault claims that Christine Blasey Ford leveled against Kavanaugh.
Some conservatives have claimed the incident Booker wrote of in 1992 is proof of the New Jersey Democrat’s hypocrisy.
A column that Senator Cory Booker wrote for a Stanford university newspaper 26 years ago in which he admitted to groping a female’s breast when he was a teenager has resurfaced
When he was a student at Stanford University, Booker admitted to grabbing a girl’s breast when he was 15 while they kissed at a New Year’s Eve party.
In the article, titled ‘So much for stealing second’, Booker wrote that the girl pushed his hand away when he groped her.
‘As the ball dropped, I leaned over to hug a friend and she met me instead with an overwhelming kiss,’ he wrote.
‘As we fumbled upon the bed… I slowly reached for her breast. After having my hand pushed away once, I reached my ‘mark.’ Our groping ended soon and while no ‘relationship’ ensued, a friendship did.
‘The next week in school she told me that she was drunk that night and didn’t really know what she was doing. While she liked me a lot, she said she just wanted to be friends.’
When he was a student at Stanford University, Booker admitted to grabbing a girl’s breast when he was 15 while they kissed at a New Year’s Eve party
Booker has been among those calling for an FBI investigation into the assault claims that Christine Blasey Ford leveled against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh
The point of Booker writing the column in 1992 was to show how that situation changed him and his attitude.
The Stanford column, which also surfaced during Booker’s 2013 campaign, has been used this week by conservatives to show that the Democrat has a ‘double standards’ in regards to sexual misconduct.
Booker’s spokeswoman, Kristin Lynch, said the column was being used for ‘disingenuous right-wing attacks… in partisan outlets for the past five years’.
‘These attacks ring hollow to anyone who reads the entirety of the column, which is in fact a direct criticism of a culture that encourages young men to take advantage of women – written at a time when so candidly discussing these issues was rare – and speaks to the impact Senator Booker’s experience working to help rape and sexual assault survivors as a college peer counselor had on him,’ Lynch said.
It comes as tensions have been running on overdrive since Ford, a 51-year-old college professor in California, went public with her allegation that Kavanaugh assaulted her when they were at a house party in high school.
Kavanaugh, 53, an appellate court judge, denied the allegation and said he wanted to testify as soon as possible to clear his name.