Julie Swetnick

Julie Swetnick is an American web and software developer who made the news late 2018 after she became the third woman to accuse Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct. She has a history of legal disputes in several states, according to Washington Post.

A Maryland-native, Swetnick was born to Martin Swetnick and Elaine Moglen Swetnick, both government bureaucrats –– her father worked on the lunar orbiter for NASA, and her mother was a geologist at the Atomic Energy Commission.

She graduated in 1980 from Gaithersburg High School in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Later, according to the Washington Post, Swetnick took pre-med courses at Montgomery College, a community college in Rockville, Maryland. However, with the advent of the dotcom era, she switched to web development, taking various IT and software development certifications.

As a software developer, she took a contract job at the State Department. Over the years, she worked for various government institutions including Customs and Border Protection, U.S. embassies, and the Internal Revenue Service. Her résumé indicates she has held security clearances at the Departments of State, Justice, Treasury, and Homeland Security.

In September 2018, Swetnick accused Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh of engaging in sexual misconduct at parties while he was a student at Georgetown Preparatory School in the 1980s.

On September 26th, her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, who represented Stormy Daniels in her suit against Donald Trump, tweeted a sworn declaration in which Swetnick claimed she observed Brett Kavanaugh at parties where women were verbally abused, inappropriately touched, made "disoriented" with alcohol or drugs and "gang raped." According to her affidavit, she met Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge in the early 1980s at house parties. She also alleged that both Kavanaugh and Judge were present when she was the victim of one such gang rape. The Wall Street Journal contacted dozens of her former classmates and colleagues, but couldn't reach anyone with knowledge of her allegations and none of her friends have come forward to publicly support her claims.

With the allegations, Swetnick became the third person to publicly accuse Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, after Palo Alto University psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford and Deborah Ramirez.

Ford had said that Kavanaugh assaulted her at a party when they were both teenagers and Ramirez told the New Yorker magazine that Kavanaugh exposed himself to her when they were both at Yale. Kavanaugh denied all three allegations.

Swetnick's claims could not be independently corroborated by The New York Times and other publications and as a result, her allegations have been treated less seriously than those of Ford and Ramirez. Senator Susan Collins, a Republican swing vote, called the Swetnick allegation "outlandish... [without] any credible supporting evidence" and Michigan Senator Gary Peters said that Avenatti's allegations "turns it into a circus atmosphere and certainly that's not where we should be..."