As Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, he addressed his controversial and cryptic senior yearbook page from 1983.
Leading up to the hearing, many people had speculated that the various comments on the Georgetown Preparatory School yearbook page were references to binge drinking and sexual exploits. However, Kavanaugh tried to provide alternative definitions to the terms’ popular slang meanings.
“Devil’s Triangle”
Common definition: A threesome involving two men and one woman, per Urban Dictionary. Additionally, Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for one of the women who accused Kavanaugh of being present at parties where gang rapes took place, previously implied that Kavanaugh’s use of the term was sexual.
Kavanaugh’s definition: A drinking game with three cups arranged in a triangle.
“Boofed”
“Judge, have you boofed yet?” appears on Kavanaugh’s yearbook page.
Common definition: The “practice of anally ingesting alcohol or drugs,” according to The New Yorker.
Kavanaugh’s definition: A joke about “flatulence.”
“Renate Alumnius”
Throughout the 1983 yearbook, this phrase reportedly appears at least 14 times. It’s in reference to Renate Schroeder, a student who attended a Catholic girls’ school near Georgetown Prep.
Kavanaugh’s classmates’ definition: An inside joke about apparent sexual conquests with Schroeder, two classmates told The New York Times. One classmate added that the Georgetown Prep boys were known for being “very disrespectful, at least verbally, with Renate.”
Kavanaugh’s definition: A joke “clumsily intended to show affection and that [Schroeder] was one of us.” He described her as “a good female friend.”
Schroeder initially signed a letter along with 64 other women pledging her support for Kavanaugh; however, after the yearbook page was leaked, she said she didn’t actually know what “Renate Alumnius” meant. “I can’t begin to comprehend what goes through the minds of 17-year-old boys who write such things, but the insinuation is horrible, hurtful and simply untrue,” she said in a statement. “I pray their daughters are never treated this way. I will have no further comment.”
“FFFFFFourth of July”
This term isn’t commonly used; however, Avenatti alleged that the six F’s stood for “Find them, French them, Feel them, Finger them, Fuck them, Forget them.”
Kavanaugh instead claimed that this wasn’t an acronym, but rather a nod to a friend of his who “wound up” his F’s before saying the “F-word,” per CBS News.
As Kavanaugh provided all of these definitions, there were no mentions close to what he described on Google — until someone in Washington, D.C. updated Wikipedia entries. According to Congress-Edits, which tracks updates to the crowdsourced website from congressional IP addresses, someone on Capitol Hill updated Wikipedia to include an entry for “Devil’s Triangle” as a drinking game.
Devil’s Triangle (disambiguation) Wikipedia article edited anonymously from US House of Representatives https://t.co/D3poeTGMuK pic.twitter.com/oB74iOxzBS
— congress-edits (@congressedits) September 27, 2018
The post has since been removed from Wikipedia.