“Wait—you have no idea what she’s going to ask you?”
“Nope.”
It was March 2024 and I was in a large house in suburban Maryland. I was standing feet from Martha MacCallum, the veteran anchor for Fox News. She was about to interview me. The guy who owned the house and rented it to the Fox crew was there. He seemed surprised I was about to step into the lion’s den and had no idea what was coming.
As it turned out, MacCallum’s a good journalist. She was prepared and asked me detailed and hard questions. She also—and this is something the liberal media never does—let me make my points and, instead of editing out what I said that contradicted the media narrative, attempted to verify what I was saying.
I’m sure she didn’t agree with everything I said. Still, standing in the kitchen of a large house watching MacCallum going over her questions while they did her makeup, I didn’t know any of that. I felt the PTSD spike in my head.
I didn’t want to be there and had thought this nightmare was over. Then in November 2023 Fox News’ Brit Hume sent out a tweet with a link to an article about me. “What happened in this case never should have,” Hume wrote, “Least of all in America. But it did. Beware of political actors, including journalists, who think their side is so undoubtedly right that they are justified in doing whatever it takes to advance its causes.” The article Hume linked to, “An American Caught in the Machine,” tells the story:
You remember Mark Judge. He is an American who, like so many who have lived and died in totalitarian states, was quietly living his life and causing no one trouble until the day that he became useful to the powerful elites. Useful, that is, not as in gainful employment, but as a sign to the rest of us that this is what would happen to us also if we got out of line.
Judge’s great sin was being a high school friend of Brett Kavanaugh, whom Donald Trump had just nominated for the Supreme Court—and not just an ordinary friend, but supposedly a partner in Kavanaugh’s crimes. “At the tip of the spear,” Judge recounts, “was an accusation that Brett had sexually assaulted a woman named Christine Blasey Ford in 1982, when he and I were seventeen and she was fifteen, and that I had been in the room when it happened.” He adds that he was “first approached with this news by a reporter, who made the accusation without telling me who was making it or where and when it allegedly occurred.” And most tellingly: “In the madness that followed, I was living in an America I did not recognize.”
"The Devil's Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi" details the entire nightmare that Judge lived, and how virtually every innocuous detail of his rather ordinary early 1980s school experience was picked over and willfully misrepresented as evidence that the teen Kavanaugh was running an industrial-level sexual molestation industry under the noses of his unsuspecting teachers and mentors. His friend Judge’s reputation was just collateral damage, but the slightest hint of moral turpitude on Judge’s part could be weaponized against Kavanaugh, and so when such evidence did not materialize, it had to be manufactured.
Hume’s interest triggered interest at Fox, and I was contacted by a producer to be a part of a documentary—a documentary about me. Then Brit Hume sent out his tweet. Shortly after, Christine Blasey Ford announced she was publishing her own “memoir”—and charging 40-70K to give a speech. After Ford's announcement, Fox hit the nitro on my story. A crew came down from New York to D.C. At this point Martha MacCallum wasn’t involved. The crew interviewed me, filmed me skateboarding, and asked a lot of questions. They shot on location outside of Georgetown Prep, the high school Kavanaugh and I attended together, as well as Hank Dietle’s, a roadhouse bar near the school. Dietle’s is where we—and not a few Jesuits—sometimes drank beer. The next day the crew left.
A couple of weeks later, one of the Fox producers called me. MacCallum had seen the footage they’d taken. She was fascinated, and this was now her story. She was coming down to talk to me.
I fought this. I’d received death threats, extortionate calls from DNC goons, and lost my girlfriend, who flipped out when the Kavanaugh story exploded. My family was traumatized. I’d talked to them for three days. I didn’t want any more. The first interviews were fine, but also made me spiral down into a PTSD hell for several days. Also, The Devil’s Triangle hadn’t gotten the amount of publicity we expected when it was published in 2022. Sales were good but not great, and I’d kind of given up on anything turning that around. I was near the blast of a nuclear-level political blast, yet The Washington Post, New York Times, online reporters and cable stations wouldn’t touch me. The reason was obvious: I’d done research and caught Blasey Ford and her demons in several lies. No way Rachel Maddow or Ruth Marcus were going near that. Several conservative outlets also kept quiet, probably because I’ve criticized them for hiring hacks and nepotism babies instead of real journalists. Conservatism, Inc. is basically parasitical, surviving off the hard work of the liberal host.
All of this was churning in my mind, and I got more depressed as the GoFundMe page, which had sustained me, became depleted. Why was I still in D.C.? My parents were gone and my brother died of cancer the year before. My girlfriend was never going to talk to me again. (There was, however, a large-breasted woman who I met after the storm passed; she knew who I was, took me to dinner and then back to her place, removed her shirt and said, “sex heals trauma.” But that's another story.) I’d been swept away in what Helen Andrews called a “shame storm.” I’d ride my bike around the house where I grew up and favorite parts of D.C. and just wonder why I’m still here. It was time to move to the beach.
And yet I also had a spiritual sense that there was unfinished business in my hometown. I’d been crucified, but not yet resurrected. When I was waffling about MacCallum I got a call from my agent, who’s been in the publishing business for decades and sent many properties to Hollywood. He’s also a rough New Yorker and put things bluntly: “Are you out of your fucking mind? This is going to sell books. You are going to get the launch the media denied you when the book was first published. Take your head out of your ass.”
So I talked to Martha MacCallum. I don’t think she was prepared for what I was about to deliver. I explained that the entire Blasey Ford conflagration was a planned opposition research hit. Ford had been talking to Emma Brown from The Washington Post since July 2018. Ford has also used an opposition researcher whom I named. They had attempted a honey trap on me and were following me the entire summer.
Many of MacCallum’s questions were tough, but the Fox people listened to my points, and aired them. I told them about Blasey For referring to me in her letter to Senator Feinstein as “Mark G. Judge.” Mark G. Judge is an old journalism byline of mine—no one calls me that. It indicates they were doing opposition research on me. There was the fact that, according to The New York Times, Blasey Ford has a friend who spent all summer doing oppo research once. There was the fact that Blasey Ford’s dates of when the alleged assault took place kept changing—they were trying to link me with Kavanaugh, and when the dates didn't work they simply changed them. The entire thing was a hit. This is why one of Blasey Ford's oldest friends, an FBI veteran who is called "Tori" in Ford's book, cut off all contact with Ford. Tori doesn't want to jeopardize her FBI reputation by promoting criminal activity. Getting the picture?
Still, MacCallum battled me. Most notably, she said I wasn’t saying that Brett was innocent. I tried to point out her faulty logic: if someone makes something up about you and you have no recollection of it, people can just assume you are guilty. You can put anybody anywhere. There’s no need for proof or due process. Then, as we were filming “b-roll” outside the house, I tried to prove my point. “You know, Martha,” I said as we walked side by side, “when we were inside and away from the cameras you touched me in an inappropriate way.” It was completely untrue, and judging by her reaction she wasn’t taking it seriously—she knew the point I was making, her face kind of went blank. “So how do you feel?” I said. If I could make that kind of charge and be believed, I argued, we’d be living in East Germany.
She thanked me for the interview and they all piled into their SUV’s and vanished. Shortly afterwards I got locker room questions from some male friends—hey, what’s Martha like in person? Is she hot? Yet I hesitated, finding myself wanting to defend her. Martha MacCallum might never agree with me. But she’d done something unheard of in modern media. She thinks it’s a he-said/she-said, when it was a planned and purely evil bombing by the left. Still, MacCallum treated me honestly and fairly.
