So how creepy is Mark Judge, Brett Kavanaugh’s prep school pal and self-described Catholic Bikini Paparazzo? Let’s go to the videos

By David Futrelle

Several days ago, a strange fellow named Mark Judge made his debut as a bit player in the Brett Kavanaugh nomination tragicomedy that now grips the nation. Judge, a hard-partying pal of Kavanaugh back in his Georgetown Prep days in the early 1980s, was allegedly on the scene when his then 17-year-old buddy Brett allegedly tried to rape the then-15 year old Christine Blasey Ford.

According to Ford, as reported in the Washington Post, Judge helped his friend “corral” her into a bedroom at a party, then watched (apparently quite amused by the spectacle) as the future Supreme Court nominee held her down and tried to rip off her clothes.

As it turns out, Judge’s alleged behavior in this alleged incident is merely the tip of the creepy iceberg when it comes to Kavanaugh’s prep school pal. Over the past several days, journalists and curious internet sleuths have pored over the articles Judge has written for assorted D-list right-wing websites — and a strange oeuvre of exceedingly creepy videos Judge posted on (then abruptly removed from) YouTube and Vimeo.

Several readers pointed out to me that I had in fact written about one of Judge’s especially icky articles way back in 2015, an attack on allegedly spoiled white women in the west, whom the very white Judge feels have “lost the capacity to appreciate and create beauty, to wonder and delight, to genuinely love,” unlike their (allegedly) more “receptive” — and apparently quite easily impressed — foreign counterparts.

In the piece, published in Real Clear Religion, Judge fondly recalled one alleged former girlfriend from India who, he said, “clutched my hand in delight at dance concerts and wept when she saw the Atlantic Ocean for the first time.”

This turns out to be fairly tame compared to some of Judge’s other writings about women. In one piece on hardboiled crime fiction for Splice Today, Judge complained that Social Justice Warriors don’t properly appreciate men’s “dark, horny, creative and a bit crazy” shadow side. And he seemed to come awfully close to endorsing date rape:

Every man who’s fit to live has his own stories about the time …  he ducked the police, got in over his head with money, or abandoned himself in pursuit of love or sex. We’ve all climbed up windowsills, driven all night, and gotten into fights over a girl.

Er, speak for yourself, dude.

Of course, a man must be able to read a woman’s signals, and it’s a good thing that feminism is teaching young men that no means no and yes means yes. But there’s also that ambiguous middle ground, where the woman seems interested and indicates, whether verbally or not, that the man needs to prove himself to her. And if that man is any kind of man, he’ll allow himself to feel the awesome power, the wonderful beauty, of uncontrollable male passion.

Let’s just luxuriate a little longer in the sheer awfulness of that last sentence:

And if that man is any kind of man, he’ll allow himself to feel the awesome power, the wonderful beauty, of uncontrollable male passion.

This is why the Senate judiciary Committee needs to call Judge to the stand, to explain if his and Kavanaugh’s alleged behavior at that prep school party was an example of the alleged “wonderful beauty” of “uncontrollable male passion.” Does Judge think that Kavanaugh “need[ed] to prove himself” to Ford by trying to rip off her clothes?

Evidently Judge — now in his fifties — still has a bit of a thing for very young women. In a 2012 piece for Real Clear Religion with the cringey title “I Am a Catholic Bikini Paparazzo,” Judge related with a certain predatory glee how he had been asked “to spend three hours taking pictures of beautiful women in bikinis — and get paid for it.”

Checking out a weekly pool party at the Capitol Skyline Hotel pool in Washington,DC, ostensibly to see if it would be a good location for a future field trip for the high-school-age kids in a local university’s summer program, Judge was apparently shooting some, er, “reference” shots when a party organizer asked him to fill in for their regular photographer, who had apparently flaked out on them that day.

“I looked around,” Judge wrote.

Dancing, hula-hooping, champaign [sic] on ice. My every Motley Crue fantasy come to life, twenty years too late.

We shook on it.

In the rest of the extremely horny post, Judge alternates between salacious (if less-than-inspired) descriptions of the “very, very attractive women. Dancing. In sexy bathing suits” that he’d been asked to photograph and weird meditations about whether or not he was being an awful sinner for wanting to bone them all. If anything, Judge’s moralizing is even hornier than his reference to his “Motley Crue fantas[ies] come to life.”

I tried to pray to my favorite saint, St. Teresa of Avila, for guidance. Teresa understood the link between eros and agape (erotic love and divine love), and compared God’s desire for us to that of a relentless lover. And what was wrong with with [sic] spending a sunny afternoon at a pool party photographing hot women and getting a check at the end? 

I literally just shuddered. And it just gets worse and worse.

As I Catholic and author of a book about John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, I knew that it is immoral to look at another with lust. Yet that same Catholicism, the religion of Michelangelo, the “Song of Songs,” and Walker Percy, had taught me that the human form, particularly the female form, is a divine work of art that offers us a chance to love how God loves. 

Somehow this devolves into a discussion of the theological implications of bikinis.

A recent article explored how men prefer regular bathing suits to string bikinis; they like something to be left up to the imagination. I think a Christ-centered man with a healthy appreciation of women can admire the female form, and express that admiration in a sacramental way, if the form is respect [sic] by him and the woman who owns it. …

There really is quite a difference between a string bikini and a one-piece. And someone who has mastered his passions can appreciate the form without it degrading into lust. I think.

Yes, I’m sure you are quite the master of your domain, dude who 100 percent was sporting a boner the entire time he was writing that. I mean, horniness isn’t a crime, and these days pretty much everyone watches porn , but Jesus Christ, dude, no one needs to hear your bizarre inner monologue about your “sacramental” appreciation of scantily clad women half your age.

So this has all been pretty bad so far. But somehow the videos — did I mention the videos? — are even worse. So bad, in fact, that Judge rushed to take them down from YouTube and Vimeo after he found himself in the limelight this week, but not before some enterprising soul saved them to his or her hard drive and re-uploaded at least the highlights of Judge’s collection. (The re-uploaded videos do seem to be authentic, matching the titles of videos whose ghosts linger on in Google webcache.)

The Majority Report with Sam Seder played some excerpts of these videos yesterday.

But these excerpts, as unsettlingly grody as they are, still may not prepare you for the sheer squickiness of the full length videos. Here’s one that Judge apparently intended as a tribute to the legendary comic Little Nemo in Slumberland. An extremely horny tribute.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udo1Uf5IpB0

His “Subconscious (Outtakes)” are even more baffling and creeptacular.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVfQzTdAD2c

IS THIS REAL LIFE

Assuming that it is, what the hell even is the point of these videos, besides giving Judge an excuse to film very young women in their underwear? How much was he spending to make them? Are there even creepier ones out there that he didn’t post?

Seriously, senators, you need to talk to this guy.