It’s not enough to find the accusers (or the defenders) sincere. I sincerely believed that I remembered my electrocution, and Loftus honestly believed she found her mother’s body. No one has produced clear, first-hand, contemporaneous — ideally written down — corroboration of the allegations against Kavanaugh. Instead, we have second-hand reconstructions of stories heard years ago.

Worse still, many of the people involved seem to have conferred with each other before the allegations went public, particularly in the Yale case; according to the New Yorker article that broke the story, Ramirez herself was initially unsure that Kavanaugh was the man who had exposed himself to her and took six days to conclude that he was.

Trying to firm up fuzzy memories about decades-old events is an invitation to confabulation. The media circus surrounding the Kavanaugh confirmation further muddled things; any witness who comes forward today must be presumed to have gathered significant details from the earlier coverage.