“Mark—I know this is insanely late, but thanks. Feel free to share.”
That’s the text I got from David Folkenflik, the media reporter at NPR, on June 5. For the past several years I have occasionally DM’d Folkenflik. Most of the time it’s to ask him a simple question: Why won’t NPR have me on the air? In 2024 NPR interviewed Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who in 2018 falsely accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her while I was in the same room looking on. NPR also ran a different piece reviewing Blasey Ford’s book One Way Back.
I’ve asked Folkenflik the same question for over two years: Why won’t NPR give me equal time? Folkenflik never answers the question. He will sometimes respond to something I didn’t ask him, like when he recently complimented me on something I wrote years ago about getting sober.
And now, suddenly, here’s Folkenflik giving me a green light to share. What changed? Graham Platner. The New York Times reported that three women who had been romantically involved with Platner, who’s running for a Senate seat in Maine, described volatile and “toxic” relationships with him. They said Platner “could be demeaning to women and, in at least one case, even physically threatening.” One of them, Lyndsey Fifield, is described this way:
Mr. Platner could be rough with her, Ms. Fifield said, particularly when they were drinking, leaving her shaken and sometimes afraid. In the interviews, Ms. Fifield grappled with how to process her experiences. She was quick to note that he “never hit me, he never punched me.”
But she said he regularly grabbed her by the shoulders—sometimes hard enough to leave marks—and, on one occasion, yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument when she wanted to stay in the car.
During one argument, she recalled, he twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out, telling her to remain there until she was “calm.” Eventually, Ms. Fifield said, she fell asleep and left the next morning. “It hurt,” she said. But she added: “It didn’t cause an injury, it didn’t break my arm.”
This is a mirror of the Kavanaugh case—with the difference that the Kavanaugh charge never happened. Blasey Ford was part of a well-orchestrated hit. She couldn’t recall the time or place of the alleged incident, and others involved, like me, were the victims of extortion, threats, and witness tampering. Suddenly all the Marxist Democrats who were scouring my yearbook for jokes and claiming Kavanaugh and I were drugging and gang-raping women are defending Platner, whose crimes have dates and witnesses. Also, as Byron York, asked, who were the women Platner was sexting with? What were their ages?
I pointed all of this out to Folkenflik, along with a link to a recent piece of mine naming the people behind the hit on Kavanaugh and. I pointed out to Folkenflik that Washingtonian magazine spent six years begging me to do a profile, then spiked it at the last minute—and to this day refuses to release the audio or transcript of the interview I did.
You think some people on the political left are hiding something? You think you might pick up the phone and ask Washingtonian why they killed the story? Maybe follow up with Cathy Alter and ask her why she won't release the audio of the interview I did? David? Hello?
“I’ll read with interest,” Folkenflik DM’d me.
Will he? Probably not. Folkenflik’s non-action reminds me of the book The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians by reporter Carlos Lozada. The Washington Book is about other books. Lozada reads all the books and other documents about the city of Washington. These are political memoirs, government documents, Supreme Court decisions: “I read histories and manifestos,” Lozada observes. “I peruse centuries-old essays and decades-old commission reports. I scour Supreme Court decisions and the text of the latest congressional investigations. I read many books about American politics l, and, I must confess, I also read books by politicians and government officials.” Lozada reads campaign biographies, “revisionist memoirs,” the “tell-all books by mid-level administration staffers,” and books by “presidents, vice presidents, senators, chiefs of staff and FBI directors.”
If it has anything to do with D.C., Lozada reads it. There’s one book Lozada won’t read—mine. In 2022 I published The Devil’s Triangle, a book about The Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearing. The book’s set in D.C. and written by me, a native of the city and a high school friend of Kavanaugh’s. The New York Times wouldn’t touch The Devil’s Triangle, leaving book reviewer Alexandra Jacobs to write, while reviewing Blasey Ford’s book, that she “longs for more about Mark Judge.” Maybe we can smuggle a copy of The Devil’s Triangle to Alexandra behind the Iron Curtain of the Times.
Folkenflik is going to “read with interest” the stuff I sent him. I look forward to his next DM, which might arrive in 2030.