At beery Yale, curses, fists, glass, blood and a student

Several Yale classmates, including a former roommate and Ludington, have described Kavanaugh as sometimes aggressive when he was drinking.

By: New York Times | New Haven | Updated: October 2, 2018 9:27:09 am

Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday. (The New York Times)

Written by Emily Bazelon and Ben Protess

As an undergraduate student at Yale, Brett Kavanaugh was involved in an altercation at a local bar during which he was accused of throwing ice on another patron, according to a police report.

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The incident, which occurred in September 1985 during Kavanaugh’s junior year, resulted in Kavanaugh and four other men being questioned by the New Haven Police Department. Kavanaugh was not arrested, but the police report stated that a 21-year-old man accused Kavanaugh of throwing ice on him “for some unknown reason.”

A witness to the fight said that Chris Dudley, a Yale basketball player who is friends with Kavanaugh, then threw a glass that hit the 21-year-old man in the ear, according to the police report, which was obtained by The New York Times.

The report said that the victim, Dom Cozzolino, “was bleeding from the right ear” and was treated at a hospital. A detective was notified of the incident at 1:20 a.m.

Dudley denied the accusation, according to the report. For his part, speaking to the officers, Kavanaugh did not want “to say if he threw the ice or not,” the police report said.

The report referred to the altercation, which occurred at a bar called Demery’s, as “an assault.” It did not say whether anyone was arrested, and there is no indication that charges were filed.

The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment Monday. Dudley did not respond to phone and email messages. Reached by text message, Cozzolino declined to comment.

The outlines of the incident were first referred to in a statement issued Sunday by Chad Ludington, one of Kavanaugh’s college classmates and a member of the Yale basketball team.

“On one of the last occasions I purposely socialized with Brett, I witnessed him respond to a semi-hostile remark, not by defusing the situation, but by throwing his beer in the man’s face,” Ludington said in the statement. Ludington, a professor at North Carolina State University, said he came forward because he believed Kavanaugh had mischaracterized the extent of his drinking at Yale.

Ludington said that he had been in touch with the FBI.

He said that the altercation happened after a UB40 concert on Sept. 25, when he and a group of people went to Demery’s and were drinking pints. At one point, they were sitting near a man who, they thought, resembled Ali Campbell, the lead singer of UB40.

“We’re trying to figure out if it’s him,” he said.

When the man noticed Ludington, Kavanaugh and the others looking at him, he objected and told them to stop it, adding an expletive, Ludington said.

Kavanaugh cursed, he said, and then “threw his beer at the guy.”

“The guy swung at Brett,” Ludington continued. At that point, Dudley “took his beer and smashed it into the head of the guy, who by now had Brett in an embrace. I then tried to pull Chris back, and a bunch of other guys tried to pull the other guy back. I don’t know what Brett was doing in the melee, but there was blood, there was glass, there was beer and there was some shouting, and the police showed up.”

Demery’s, which closed in 1994, was a well-known bar that served big slices of pizza and cheap beer, especially after 9 p.m. It drew a crowd that included “older Yalies and younger ones with good fake IDs,” according to thepolitic.org.

Dudley, who after Yale went on to the NBA and was the Republican nominee for governor of Oregon in 2010, has spoken out in support of Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination and disputed reports that he drank excessively.

Several Yale classmates, including a former roommate and Ludington, have described Kavanaugh as sometimes aggressive when he was drinking.