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Julie Swetnick, one of the women who publicly accused Supreme Court candidate Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, has a long history of involvement in litigation, including a lawsuit in which an ex-employer accused her of falsifying her college and professional studies on his job application.
Legal documents from Maryland, Oregon, and Florida give a partial picture of a woman who went into the media glow in the middle of the battle for the appointment of Kavanaugh to the highest court in the country.
Court records reviewed by The Associated Press show that Swetnick has been involved in at least six court cases over the past 25 years. In addition to the lawsuit filed by a former employer in November 2000, this included a personal injury lawsuit filed in 1994 against the regional transit authority, Washington, D.C.
His attorney, Michael Avenatti, told the AP that the lawsuits against her had no bearing on the credibility of her claims about Kavanaugh. Avenatti stated that the complaint of her former employer – she had been rejected a month after she was filed – was "completely false, which is why she was rejected almost immediately".
He told AP that he had "completely approved" Swetnick before helping him make his claims against Kavanaugh.
Avenatti issued Swetnick's affidavit last week in which she claims to have witnessed Kavanaugh "routinely engaging in excessive alcohol consumption and inappropriate sexual contact with women in the early 1980s." ". In her statement, which was given to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Ms. Swetnick stated that she was sexually assaulted at a party attended by members of Kavanaugh's social circle, but did not charge her with to have assaulted him. Two other women publicly accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting them.
One of these women, Christine Blasey Ford, appeared Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee to offer emotional testimony that even Kavanaugh's most ardent supporters, including Trump, have said they have found credibility. Another woman, Deborah Ramirez, accused Kavanaugh of exposing herself to her at a drunken party while both were students at Yale University. Ramirez's friends and colleagues describe her as a discreet person who is dedicated to defending families in need and the victims of domestic violence.
Swetnick was the third accuser named Kavanaugh to emerge, when Avenatti released details of his charges on Twitter on the eve of Ford's testimony.
Kavanaugh denied the claims about her made by Swetnick and other women, calling some of these allegations "joke" and "joke".
Ann Simonton, a rape advocate and director of Media Watch, a nationally recognized media literacy organization, warned that many victims of sexual violence face chaos and problems later on. underlying abuse allegations. "This type of trauma will affect your daily life forever," she said.
Swetnick, from Washington, Maryland's suburbs, said she wanted to be interviewed by Congress or the FBI. On Twitter, Avenatti wrote that Swetnick and himself "would fully appreciate" the embarrassing Republicans in the Judiciary Committee this weekend "when his story will be told and deemed credible". Swetnick recorded an interview with "The Circus", a political program part of Showtime's schedule on Sunday.
Some details of the legal conflicts in which she has been involved are not known because the documents in the cases are incomplete or are no longer available. The lawsuit filed in late 2000 by his former employer Webtrends, a software company based in Oregon, does not say why he was fired. Avenatti said that there was a settlement in the case but no money changed hands.
In its civil complaint in an Oregon state court, the company said Swetnick, a software engineer, was an employee a few weeks before his HR department received a report stating that she had committed male colleagues during a business lunch.
The lawsuit stated that Swetnick in turn accused Webtrends of having subjected her to "physically and emotionally threatening and hostile conditions" and that she had claimed to have been sexually harassed by four colleagues. Colleagues denied the allegations, the prosecution said.
Company officials later determined, according to the lawsuit, that Swetnick had provided false information about his application for employment. The lawsuit alleged that he had misinterpreted the length of his employment with a former employer and falsely claimed to have obtained an undergraduate degree in biology and chemistry from Johns Hopkins University.
Her lawyer, Avenatti, said that "whether or not she graduates from college does not matter if she is a victim of sexual assault".
Helene Moglen, Swetnick's aunt, told AP this week that her niece had gone to college but had quickly returned home. In an interview with the Washington Post, Swetnick's father reportedly stated that "she embarked on a computer adventure and became an expert in computer science.He's a strong woman."
None of the executives named in the lawsuit are still working at Webtrends. Calls and e-mails addressed to the company's headquarters in Portland, seeking comments, have not received any response. The lawyer who represented the company in the lawsuit also did not return messages asking for comment on Thursday and Friday.
Swetnick was an adverse party in a civil case in 1994, as a plaintiff, when she sued in Maryland against the Metropolitan Area Transit Authority of Washington. She claimed to have lost more than $ 420,000 in earnings after being injured on the nose during a fall on a train in 1992.
Swetnick, who has described herself in court records as a model and actor, asserted that she had "many modeling commitments" with several companies at the time of the accident, but had missed them because of his injuries.
To support his claim for lost wages, Swetnick has named "Konam Studios" as one of the companies promising to use it. A court file identified Nam Ko, a representative of "Kunam Studios", as a possible witness to the plaintiff.
Ko, however, told AP on Friday that he was only a friend of Swetnick and that he had never owned a company with a name spelled out, or agreed to pay him money for some work before getting hurt on his nose. He said he first met Swetnick in a bar more than a year after his alleged accident.
"I did not have any money at the time, I was (or was) broken as best I can," Ko said.
Ko stated that he remembered Swetnick badly asking him to use it as a "character reference", but did not remember hearing about his lawsuit.
"I thought it was for a candidacy," he said.
In response to questions about the trial, Avenatti said: "All this is hearsay … … none of this is relevant, not a bit."
The documents filed in the lawsuit include a letter addressed to Swetnick's lawyer by Richard Zamora, identified as a marketing manager of a San Jose-based company called Fiber Sign Inc. In his letter dated March 1994 Zamora said it was ready to hire Swetnick as a model and spokesperson and pay him a base salary of $ 60,000, but offered the job to another person after learning of his accident.
Zamora subsequently asked a Florida court to make a restraining order against Swetnick. The remaining court records do not show the reasons he gave for the blocking order, but indicate that the case was dropped less than two weeks later, when none of the parties had appeared before the court. the tribunal.
Zamora, who now goes by Richard Vinneccy, declined to comment this week AP about the letter or the nature of the relationship he had with Swetnick.
Avenatti said the request for a restraining order was "nonsense".
The court records show that Swetnick's lawsuit against the transit agency was filed in 1997 after the conclusion of an agreement. Vincent Jankoski, one of the lawyers who defended the agency, said that the case had been settled without anything being paid to Swetnick, who had not provided the documentation to supporting his claims for lost wages.
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