Alyssa Milano would be perfect.
We’re casting for our movie, The Devil’s Triangle. The film is based on my 2022 book of the same name. One of the parts is for a woman, late-50s, who’s someone I dated in high school in the 1980s. We reunite in 2018 after a political earthquake upends both of our lives. The woman, whom I call Isabella in the book, is a creative, sexy and smart bohemian.
It’s a small but crucial part. Alyssa Milano is ideal. First, however, Milano has to apologize to me.
In the fall of 2018 the political left and the media tried to destroy Brett Kavanaugh, a high school friend of mine. They used opposition research, extortion threats and an attempted honey trap. A woman named Christine Blasey Ford accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her in 1982 when we were all in high school. Ford claimed that I was in the room when it happened. When I was reached by Ronan Farrow in September 2018, Farrow accused me of “sexual misconduct” without telling me who the victim was, where it had allegedly happened, or where. Oppo research was fed directly to the media, who passed it on without scrutiny.
Into this maelstrom was thrown Isabella, a girl I’d dated in high school. Isabella went to high school with Blasey Ford. A liberal, she believed Ford and publicly said so, bringing a media swarm to her door, which made her plead for privacy and withdraw her account.(One problem: Isabella said the Blasey Ford incident was “the talk at school the day after it happened—something hard to imagine as the claim was that it happened in the summer, when school was out.)
After the nightmare was over, Isabella got in touch with me. We decided to meet at a local diner. This is a crucial part of The Devil’s Triangle. Isabella’s friends were appalled that she was meeting me, and my friends were irritated that I was meeting with her. Yet we always had a tight bohemian connection, as well as both physical and intellectual attractions. Above all, we’re friends. Meeting was a way of saying, screw politics. Let’s have a moment of grace.
Like Isabella, Alyssa Milano has a dark beauty. However, before officially offering Milano the part, she needs to correct mistakes she made in her 2021 book Sorry Not Sorry.
“I was on set when I first heard the name Brett Kavanaugh,” Milano writes. Milano’s dyspepsia was instant. Kavanaugh was “insanely anti-choice,” and “yet another rich white man who attended private school and was going to be deciding what I could do with my body. I hated it. I vowed to fight against his nomination with everything had.” It was “time to gear up for war.” Never mind that Kavanaugh’s family didn’t have wealth until after we graduated from high school.
Here is Milano on Christine Blasey Ford: “Never, never in the world would I condone fabricating false accusations against a man for political gain. Not once. If Christine Blasey Ford’s story did not have so much corroborating evidence and so much consistency I would not have supported bringing her accusations into the Senate hearings until such evidence came forth. But it was there from the start. She told the same story consistently over the years. She told it to a therapist who had notes verifying it. She told it to her husband. She spoke about the attack to friends over the years. The details remained consistent. She took and passed a polygraph. She did not set out to talk to the press or make her story public, she sent a letter to her senator.”
Milano concludes: “[Ford] did not have a political agenda—she had a patriotic agenda… This process played out in the very definition of due process, an official hearing.”
Every word of Milano’s analysis is wrong. In his book We’ve Got People, Ryan Grim, who broke the first story about Ford, notes that Blasey Ford took repeated steps to come forward. She was only asking for confidentiality until she and Sen. Dianne Feinstein spoke.
Grim: [Ford’s] letter included a request: “As a constituent, I expect that you will maintain this confidential until we have further opportunity to speak.” That line would end up being used repeatedly by Feinstein as she claimed that, in fact, Blasey Ford never wanted to come forward, and was only forced out by the media. But that argument ignored that Blasey Ford had already taken repeated steps to come forward, had already told friends she planned to do so, had already come forward to two congressional offices and reached out to the press, and was only asking for confidentiality until she and Feinstein spoke.
As far as Ford’s story remaining consistent, it helps to turn to the report by Rachel Mitchell, the sex crime prosecutor who as hired by the Republicans to question Ford. From her report:
Dr. Ford has not offered a consistent account of when the alleged assault happened. In a July 6 text to the Washington Post, she said it happened in the “mid 1980s.” In her July 30 letter to Senator Feinstein, she said it happened in the “early 80s.” Her August 7 statement to the polygrapher said that it happened one “high school summer in early 80’s,” but she crossed out the word “early” for reasons she did not explain. A September 16 Washington Post article reported that Dr. Ford said it happened in the “summer of 1982.” Similarly, the September 16 article reported that notes from an individual therapy session in 2013 show her describing the assault as occurring in her “late teens.” But she told the Post and the Committee that she was 15 when the assault allegedly occurred. She has not turned over her therapy records for the Committee to review. While it is common for victims to be uncertain about dates, Dr. Ford failed to explain how she was suddenly able to narrow the timeframe to a particular season and particular year.
The report goes on to note: Dr. Ford has struggled to identify Judge Kavanaugh as the assailant by name. No name was given in her 2012 marriage therapy notes. No name was given in her 2013 individual therapy notes. Dr. Ford’s husband claims to recall that she identified Judge Kavanaugh by name in 2012. At that point, Judge Kavanaugh’s name was widely reported in the press as a potential Supreme Court nominee if Governor Romney won the presidential election.
Then there’s this absurdity: Ford “does not remember who invited her to the party or how she heard about it. She does not remember how she got to the party. She does not remember in what house the assault allegedly took place or where that house was located with any specificity. Perhaps most importantly, she does not remember how she got from the party back to her house.”
The Christine Blasey Ford fiasco was a hit, Alyssa. It was an oppo-research bomb dropped by the DNC. This was not “the very definition of due process,” it was the opposite. It was The Lives of Others and Darkness at Noon meets Caddyshack—which is a good description of what we’re going for in our movie. In a scene near the end, Isabella and meet at the Tastee Diner in Maryland. It's a tender moment between two old lovers and friends, and is crucial to the idea that friendship and basic humanity are outside of, and more important than, politics.
Alyssa Milano would crush it. In a recent Instagram post she appeared without makeup in a photo to celebrate turning 52. "This is 52,” it reads. “No make up. No filters. Happiness. Sprinkle that sh-t everywhere. I love you all. Even the trolls. If you can hate a stranger—I can love a stranger. So… I love you.”
I love you too, girl. Look at our script. It's okay to admit fault. Even if Maureen Dowd still won’t, the New York Times will.