Republican Senate investigators are inquiring about a fourth woman accusing Brett Kavanaugh of gender-based violence.
The anonymous complaint, which alleges a drunken Kavanaugh physically assaulted a woman in Washington, D.C., in 1998, was in a letter sent to Republican Colorado senator Cory Gardner, NBC News reports. Kavanaugh would have been around 33 at the time.
In the letter, the accuser claims that after an evening with Kavanaugh, her daughter, and some friends, "they were all shocked when Brett Kavanaugh, shoved her friend up against the wall very aggressively and sexually." The letter said they were all drinking and that Kavanaugh was inebriated.
The anonymous woman alleges there were at least four witnesses to the assault, including her daughter. She did not provide names but wrote that the alleged victim was still suffering from the trauma of the attack and wants to remain anonymous.
The Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday asked Kavanaugh about the new complaint during a phone call; he denied the allegation. In the call, which took place shortly after noon, Republican staffers questioned Kavanaugh while Democrats remained silent on the line. A Democratic source told NBC that the minority representatives were not satisfied by the questions Republicans asked on the phone call and believed a further investigation was necessary.
"We have no reason to assign the letter credibility, and even if we did, we'd have no way to investigate the allegation as it was made anonymously and cannot be corroborated," Senate Republicans on the Judiciary Committee wrote as they released the fourth complaint.
NBC also reached out to the White House but had not yet received a response.
Christine Blasey Ford is set to testify in front of the committee tomorrow to describe her alleged sexual assault at the hands of Kavanaugh; Ford says Kavanaugh attempted to rape her at a house party in the 1980s. Another woman, Kavanaugh's Yale classmate Deborah Ramirez, told The New Yorker's Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow that Kavanaugh exposed himself to her at a college party and tried to get her to touch his penis when both were inebriated. Today, Julie Swetnick went public with the claim that Kavanaugh was present at parties where teenage boys drugged girls and then gang-raped them; Swetnick says she was a victim at one of these gatherings.