One of Brett Kavanaugh’s college roommates has come forward to talk about the Supreme Court nominee’s drinking problem, and also about a dead pigeon he found nailed to his door.
Kit Winter was an out gay man at Yale University in the early 1980’s, the same time that Kavanaugh attended that school. They lived together in a three-person suite, with Winter in a single room and Kavanaugh sharing a double room with James Roche.
Roche has already talked to the media about how Kavanaugh was a “aggressive and belligerent” drunk, and several other people who knew Kavanaugh in high school and college have contradicted his claim that he never drank so much that he had a memory lapse.
Winter, too, recalls Kavanaugh’s excessive drinking, remembering Kavanaugh and his friends as “loud, obnoxious frat boy-like drunks.”
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“There was a lot of vomit in the bathroom. No one ever cleaned it up. It was disgusting. It wasn’t incidental. It wasn’t, ‘Oh, this weekend someone puked in the bathroom.’ People were constantly puking in the bathroom. Constantly.”
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In an interview with The Cut, Winter describes an incident involving a dead pigeon that he found nailed to his door – the door to his room, not the outside door to the suite.
“I interpreted it as an act of social hostility slash terrorism,” Winter said. “I thought it was a very clear message. ‘We don’t like you, and we don’t want you here.’ I didn’t know who it was who didn’t want me here. I didn’t know who had done it.”
Several of his friends at the time corroborated that a bird was nailed to the door, although no one knew who did it.
“I remember that Kit was really unhappy with his roommates,” said Lori Adams, a retired psychiatrist who was Winter’s friend at Yale.
“They were jocks and Kit was an out gay man with peroxide blond hair. He was uncomfortable there. And he didn’t spend much time there.”
Winter didn’t report the dead bird to the police and he didn’t ask to change rooms, since he had already asked the dean to move him into the empty single-person room in the suite.
“I think my general response was, screw you,” Winter said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Winter also doesn’t buy Kavanaugh’s claim that he did not drink excessively.
“Having witnessed the level of drunkenness of Brett and his crew in that dorm, and the vomitous aftermath in the bathroom, I find that very hard to believe,” that he never had memory lapses while drinking, Winter said.
“I was not a blackout drinker, but there’s tons of stuff I don’t remember because I was drinking a lot, frequently. Anybody who drank a lot in college and can stand up 35 years later and say, ‘I am sure that did not happen’ inherently lacks credibility to me.”
