FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

The VICE Guide to Right Now

Kavanaugh’s Ex-Roommate: Devil’s Triangle Was Totally a Sex Thing

Specifically a threesome, according to Urban Dictionary.
Drew Schwartz
Brooklyn, US
Screengrab via CNN

Brett Kavanaugh's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee about allegations of sexual assault somehow devolved into a unhinged yelling match about beer, blacking out, and bizarre yearbook references. Not only that, but according to Kavanaugh's freshman roommate at Yale (not to mention Urban Dictionary), the SCOTUS nominee also lied under oath.

When asked about the terms "boofing" and "Devil's Triangle," Kavanaugh told Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse that they were, respectively, just juvenile words for farting and a weird drinking game that no one's ever heard of. But in a recent op-ed for Slate and an interview with CNN, Kavanaugh's Yale roommate James Roche explained that the pretty blatantly sexual-sounding terms were, in fact, sexual.

Advertisement

"Those words were commonly used, and they were references to sexual activities," Roche told Anderson Cooper on live TV. "If you think about the context in which you might hear those words, the way that he described [how] they are defined and the way they are defined, they’re not interchangeable."

A quick look at Urban Dictionary will tell you that "boofing" is a euphemism for anal sex, and a Devil's Triangle is, as we all suspected, a threesome—specifically, to cite the definition, between one woman and two dudes where it's "important" not to "make eye contact." Somehow Kavanaugh apparently figured he'd pass them off as something else, under oath, despite Google search results pointing to something else entirely.

To Roche, all that talk about butt stuff and threesomes went beyond Kavanaugh and his pals having a good laugh. As he tells it, it was indicative of something problematic about their attitude toward women.

"I heard them talking about it regularly," Roche said. "I think that contributed to some of my feelings about the fact that these guys treated women in a way I didn’t like."

According to Roche, Kavanaugh also lied about his drinking. Despite being the self-appointed treasurer of the "Keg City Club—100 Kegs or Bust" in high school, Kavanaugh also insisted that he's never drank to the point of blacking out or passing out—but Roche told CNN he came home "incoherent" and "stumbling" all the time, and threw up from drinking too much more than once.

Advertisement

"There were people who were loud drunks, who were sloppy drunks, who were belligerent drunks,” Roche said on CNN. "But even by those standards, my memory of Brett was that he was on the far edge of this. He was notably heavier in his drinking than other people."

The FBI has already wrapped up its background investigation into Kavanaugh, and according to Roche, investigators never approached him for an interview—so, ostensibly, the feds are still under the impression that a Devil's Triangle has something to do with three glasses of booze. Still, the Senate is scheduled to go ahead and vote on Kavanaugh's confirmation on Friday, despite the fact that, as Roche claimed in Slate, he lied "baldly, without hesitation or reservation" in his hearing.

"Not only did I know that he wasn’t telling the truth," Roche said on CNN. "I knew that he knew he wasn’t telling the truth.”

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.

Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.