It’s late October, homecoming weekend for Georgetown Prep, class of ’83, the one that Brett Kavanaugh made famous, featuring P.J., Squi, Timmy, Tom, Tobin, Mark Judge, et al. Earlier today, the Hoyas football team gave Kavanaugh, sporting a bright-red baseball hat, a hero’s welcome. Victory was in the air. Prep, as it’s known, was in the middle of trouncing Episcopal, 24–6. Kavanaugh had finally clinched his seat on the Supreme Court, after all those ridiculous attacks on his character. Now, the alumni have gathered in a generic, brightly lit room at Pinstripes, a sprawling restaurant and bowling alley in Bethesda, Maryland. If the group looks remarkable in any way, it’s for their uniformity. All white, all fitter than your average 53-year-olds. Most are dressed in suburban-dad wear: there are a lot of pleated khakis, some fleece, and brown Eddie Bauer-style shoes for the active, middle-aged bro. When they step outside the private room to use the restroom or meander, they do American Guy stuff. They take out their phones and type importantly. They check the score of Game Four of the World Series. They mutter skeptically about putting any hope in the Redskins this year. They order better drinks than what’s apparently available inside. A handful of them have brought their wives, who look like they wouldn’t mind calling it a night. Up at the bar, one of the wives asks her husband what he wants to drink. “An Artois,” he snaps at her. Duh.

There’s Tom Kane, who, according to Kavanaugh’s calendar, was among the boys at “Timmy’s” house on July 1, 1982. There’s super-ripped J. C. del Real, working a bottle of beer. The former Hoyas tight end and “president” of the Renate Alumni, he now runs a consulting company for gyms. And here is Don Urgo, who, back in the day, threw memorable ragers at his parents’ big house in Potomac. One of the class leaders for the reunion, Urgo greets the Reverend James Van Dyke, the new president of Georgetown Prep, and ushers him into the private room. Inside, according to a recording obtained by The New York Times, Van Dyke tells them, “You guys, the class of 1983, are in some ways my first class. We’ve been all thrown into the mix together.” He adds, “I have heard so many of your names,” to whoops of “Squi!” and “P.J.!” He praises “the loyalty that you have had to each other, the way that you have looked after each other, and not just in the big stories but also a lot of small stories.”

Indeed, tonight is a victory celebration, and it can largely be attributed to Georgetown Prep’s particular code of omertà. Kavanaugh gestured at this code in a 2015 speech, fondly recalling the saying, “What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep,” which suggests guys bonded together by a shared history of mischief. But the code is more than that. It’s also about preserving a certain world order. Over the years, the code has helped to smooth out bad news, and to sweep ugly allegations under the rug. Those who live by the code aren’t just Prep’s alumni and students, but the school’s network of Catholic priests, teachers, wives, and family members. The Kavanaugh allegations tested the bounds of the code, but it was not the first scandal to do so.

The fraternal bonds connecting Kavanaugh’s group began at the Catholic, all-boys elementary school Mater Dei, which he attended with two of his best friends, Chris Garrett, a.k.a. Squi, and Tobin Finizio, who became one of his drinking buddies. Fostering competition early on, teachers reported the class academic rankings on a chalkboard. Kavanaugh’s name was always at the top. Due to the small class size of 40 students, “the middle school was even more treacherous than high school,” says Timothy Don, who was a year behind Kavanaugh at Mater Dei and later at Prep. “The cliques are just much more deeply established . . . and boys, as a result, can be more vicious.”

Mater Dei fed into two all-boys high schools, Gonzaga and Georgetown Prep. Gonzaga was located in a rough-and-tumble neighborhood of inner-city Washington, while Prep, in leafy Bethesda, had a nine-hole golf course. “There was a mutual distaste,” says Michael Farquhar, an ’82 Gonzaga alum. Kavanaugh and his friends each had the line “GONZAGA YOU’RE LUCKY” on their respective yearbook pages. According to an ’83 Gonzaga graduate, this was a brag—that the Prep gang would have come to mess with the Gonzaga riffraff had the school not been surrounded by a ghetto.

Specialness was conferred early. Unlike the vast majority of Catholics in Montgomery County, who were working class, the Prep boys, who numbered around 100 per class, were the sons of well-off families from Bethesda, Chevy Chase, and Potomac, the wealthy horse country a few miles out. (A notch below St. Albans and Sidwell Friends in terms of college matriculation, Georgetown Prep has produced a handful of notables, including Jerome Powell, chairman of the Federal Reserve, comedian-writer Mo Rocca, and restaurateur David Chang.) They were mostly the offspring of conservatives, with the prominent exception of two Kennedys (Christopher and Doug) and two Shrivers (Anthony and Mark). In those days, only a handful were students of color; most were the sons of wealthy diplomats, from places like Iran or Thailand. Nor did a Prep man see many women: The school was presided over by four or five priests and a bunch of lay male Catholics. Any female presence consisted of little more than the librarian, the secretary in the president’s office, and four teachers. An alum from Kavanaugh’s era who looked Semitic recalls the casual use of “Jewboy” and “Don’t be such a Jew” when he would try to raise funds for some school-related purpose. Richard Madaleno, ’83, one of the few students whose roots were Italian, not Irish, recalls frequent gibes about the Mob. Now a Maryland state senator, Madaleno had the added burden of being gay, and remembers believing he was bound for Hell.

Prep preached the Jesuit motto, “Men for Others.” For some, it was a profound message. “A ‘man for others,’ that’s real,” says Don, now an editor at Lapham’s Quarterly. “We didn’t spend Sunday mornings watching television and playing video games, like my kids do. We went to church and then went to work in soup kitchens. You build service into your practice. There was a real sense of, You’ve been given a lot so that you can do a lot with it.” Other students, like Neil Gorsuch, ’85, also took that to heart, applying Prep’s intellectual rigor to debate, and into a life of service.

But Kavanaugh and many of his friends were known to take their privilege as license to act with obnoxious abandon. This type of group wasn’t unique in the history of Georgetown Prep. Every senior class had a version—a band of bros, usually football players, who staked their claim as kings of the school. Indeed, anyone who’s gone to any high school in America, or watched a John Hughes film, inherently gets this world order. On an individual level, some from Kavanaugh’s group weren’t so bad. Their schoolmates say Bernie and P.J. were pretty decent. Squi was a sloppy drunk, according to a friend, but basically O.K.

But an unholy trinity was at the top. J. C. del Real, whose father was a lawyer in the Reagan administration, was the classic bully. Consider the afternoon, in the fall of 1982, when he walked through the student lounge with his crew, picked up a small freshman named Tim, and stuffed him in a garbage can, while J.C.’s friends erupted in laughter. Bill Barbot, Tim’s self-described pipsqueak buddy, pulled him out. He can still recall Tim’s light-colored khakis, which now had pizza sauce all over them. “I was like, Man, this sucks,” Barbot recalls thinking, as it dawned on him what he was in for that year.

Kavanaugh, according to some former classmates, was not the central showman, but rather an eager sidekick. An alum who knew Kavanaugh well recalls, “He had the attitude of ‘I’m the man, I’m a badass, and everybody else is kind of a loser. I do what I want. I get what I want.’ He was more of a dick, for lack of a better word. I wish I had a more descriptive word. He was just a dick.” Another alum, from ’84, dismisses Kavanaugh as a hopeless wannabe: “He was kind of lame.” According to Paul Rendon, class of ’83, who provided a declaration to Congress, “Kavanaugh never did anything to stop this physical and verbal abuse, but stood by and laughed at the victims. . . . Brett Kavanaugh would always laugh the loudest when it was in response to Mark Judge’s jokes and antics.”

Judge took the cake. He was the loudest, edgiest, baddest ass. He was also the heartthrob. In Breakfast Club terms, you might say he had the dangerous allure of Judd Nelson’s Bender combined with the popularity of Emilio Estevez’s Andrew Clark. His body couldn’t contain his energy. He would leap onto people’s backs to start games of chicken. He could place his hands on a banister and jettison his body over an entire stairwell. Anyone wanting deep insight into his character can find it in his memoir Wasted, a chronicle of his early alcoholism and sputtering moral compass. He writes about his irritation at having to journal his service experiences. He recounts taking part in ritual toilet-papering of girls’ houses wearing religious robes. (One classmate says this likely gave rise to the term “Ridge Klux Klan,” which appears on the yearbook pages of Urgo, Finizio, and Kane.) He tells of the underground newspaper The Unknown Hoya, which he and others started with the intention “to insult people and to report on . . . who had what party, who had embarrassed themselves, who had the worst haircuts on campus, who was getting laid, and most important, how much we were drinking.” The Hoya,he says, “was the official journal of the 100-keg quest and everything that happened on the way.” (Judge, Kavanaugh, and del Real all declined to comment for this story.)

In high school, there are always kids who make a lifestyle out of under-age drinking. But one chronic partier from the era tells me, “Prep ran the party scene. We were good at what we did.” The drill started with the question of whose parents were going to be out of town that weekend—who would be “poppin’.” Typically, the guys would drive to Potomac to buy the kegs, as many as would fit in a car. (Until the summer of 1982, the drinking age in Maryland was 18, and many kids had fake IDs or helpful older siblings.) A Corvette would be the height of cool. The revelers could number into the hundreds, with cars parked every which way in the neighborhood. Guys drank until they passed out or puked, and then maybe drank some more. At one more memorable Prep party, a guy passed out on the driveway, and another drunk guy ran over him with his car. (He survived relatively unscathed.)

Even at hard-partying Prep, Kavanaugh was notorious for his beer consumption. “I never saw him assault anyone, but the guy was always trashed,” says an ’84 alumnus. Another friend who partied with him nearly every weekend recalls the gang piling into Kavanaugh’s Chevy Malibu, which he called “the Bu,” for drunken weekend escapades.

Some graduates recall priests and teachers drinking with the boys. It happened, they say, at football camp, when the players slept at the school each year at the end of August, and at bachelor parties for teachers and coaches, one of which Judge fondly reminisces about in his other book about the school, God and Man at Georgetown Prep. (Prep insists that it maintains “specific and strict terms of personal conduct which forbid drinking, violence, or bullying of any kind,” and says it has taken disciplinary action “in every instance when the school has become aware of any transgression of those rules.”)

Then there were the girls, who poured into the party scene looking for self-affirmation. “The Prep boys were the pinnacle of teenage society,” says Evie Shapiro, who attended high school in Potomac and worked briefly with Judge after college. “While we aspired to go out with them, we were also kind of scared of them.” They came from Prep’s all-girls Catholic counterparts: Stone Ridge, nickname Stone Fridge, because they would stop just short of having sex; Immaculata, nickname Ejaculata, because they might go all the way; and Visitation, where Kavanaugh and company had their most solid counterpart during their junior and senior years. They were the “Visi girls,” a clique that included Maura Molloy, who dated Kavanaugh and eventually married Tom Kane. Once in a while, girls from Holton-Arms, where Christine Blasey Ford went to school, showed up. Unlike the Visi girls, Holton girls weren’t their girls. They weren’t Catholic, for one thing. And as Judge’s underground newspaper declared, Holton-Arms “is the home of the most worthless excuses for human females. If you will care to look below, you will see all it takes to have a good time with any H.H. (Holton Hosebag).”

At a typical party, the Prep boy would put the Who or the Stones on the turntable, and the action started. As Judge put it, “If you could breathe and walk at the same time, you could hook up with someone.” But hooking up wasn’t always about mutual pleasure. Since Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing, countless women from his private-school scene have been sharing experiences they had that mirror the one Blasey Ford described. “Like Chrissy, I don’t remember the house where I was assaulted,” Kelly Fordon, who graduated Visitation in ’85, says. “I don’t remember the date, and I’m absolutely certain that no one who was at the party besides me and the perpetrator would have any memory of the events. One thing I remember with absolute clarity is the person who assaulted me.”

Kavanaugh and his friends, as we learned during his hearing, laughed about the violence in their 1983 yearbook. There was the caption “Do these guys beat their wives?” accompanying a shot of one group of boys. There was the quote from Judge’s page: “Certain women should be struck regularly, like gongs.” There was the repeated mention of “Renate Alumni,” referring to a girl from Stone Ridge whom the guys bragged about having sex with.

Prep, of course, wasn’t the only school that denigrated girls. At St. Albans, there was a game called “butt rodeo,” where one guy would distract a girl, another guy would bite her butt, and somebody else would time how long it took her to shake him off. Boys would also compete for the Dog House Award, which went to the guy who hooked up with the girl they deemed the ugliest.

So why did girls even show up? “I wanted to go to those parties, and I wanted that group of guys to like me,” says an alum from National Cathedral School. She cringes at the memory of sitting on the stairs at a party, giggling and flattered, while a boy tried to take off her bra in public. “I am complicit in that,” she says.

Some alumni say that school officials failed to rein in the abusive culture in the Prep community. “The administration was so focused on raising money and protecting their reputation,” says an ’84 graduate, “that they were asleep at the wheel.” But Georgetown Prep rejects what it calls the “warped assumption” that it neglected its duties. “Schools like Georgetown Prep exist for the explicit purpose of giving young people the tools and moral education to confront sin in the world by building personal character in a life of service to others,” says Patrick Coyle, a spokesman for the school. “This is our abiding mission, Georgetown Prep’s very reason for being, and the essential fabric of our whole school community.”

In the years after Kavanaugh graduated, Prep began to change with the times. With the emergence of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and a group called Community of Concern, parents were asked not to sanction after-prom parties off campus. In 1990, Prep expelled four boys for an act of hazing known as “butting,” in which a student would pull down his pants and squat his bare bottom into the face of another boy. But such gestures failed to shift the broader culture of harassment at Prep. The father of one of the expelled boys sued unsuccessfully, claiming that his son was taking the fall for a practice the school knew was widespread. “In the context of the day, the hazing was not extraordinary, even though by today’s standards it’s horrible,” recalls an alum from the post-Kavanaugh era. “But what was crazy to me was a lot of it was condoned by the school.” The Prep code of loyalty—between students, priests, faculty members, and alumni—remained unbreakable.

As a Catholic institution, Georgetown was not immune to the larger crisis of sexual abuse that was roiling the Church. Eric Ruyak, who graduated in 2004, two decades after Kavanaugh, was the son of a board member, the younger brother of a star alum, and a devout Catholic. He was also gay and closeted, which might have made life difficult. But by sophomore year, he had found his group at Prep, in the theater department. This was largely thanks to Father Garrett Orr, the head of the program, who had become his mentor.

In the fall of 2002, Ruyak, then a 16-year-old junior, had been cast as the lead in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. According to Ruyak, Orr asked him into his office for a one-on-one rehearsal. Orr, who had taught at Prep for 14 years, closed the door, came up behind Ruyak, placed his left hand on his shoulder, and put his right hand down Ruyak’s pants.

Shocked, Ruyak immediately left Orr’s office and went home. He didn’t tell his parents. The next day, Orr approached him, wanting to discuss what “we” had done. Ruyak made it clear that “we” hadn’t done anything: Orr had acted entirely on his own, and completely inappropriately. But Ruyak, now a jewelry designer in Los Angeles, decided to keep the episode to himself. (Orr did not respond to requests for comment for this story.)

By the following summer, however, others at Prep were aware that Orr represented a threat. According to prosecutors, two faculty members who were friends of Orr, Stephen Ochs and Julie Collins, went to school officials and said they had concerns about Orr’s “lack of boundaries with students.” (The school says it has “no record” of any such concern.) Orr was quietly sent to what prosecutors later called “a sex-offender sort of clinic” in St. Louis. In a letter to the Prep community, Orr said that he was taking a sabbatical after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

Then, in the fall of 2003, Ruyak learned that Orr planned to return to the school after Christmas. In keeping with Prep’s mission of confronting sin and serving others, he decided to speak up—in part because his younger brother would be attending Prep the following year. That October, Ruyak went to Father Gregory Eck, another priest at Prep and a trusted family friend, with the story of what happened to him.

Upon hearing what Orr had done, Ruyak recalls, Eck seemed sympathetic. He told Eric that he would need to inform school authorities. Eck promptly told Eric’s parents, and then informed Prep’s headmaster, who “dismissed the allegations as untrue,” according to prosecutors. (Prep calls that assertion “baseless.”) Fortunately, Eric found an advocate in Father William George, the school’s president, who made him feel heard and supported.

Then the backlash began—not against Orr, but against Ruyak. It started, according to the Ruyaks, with Stephen Ochs and Julie Collins, the very faculty members who had alerted the school about their friend’s “boundary” issues. Eric’s father, Robert, says he was asked to meet with the two teachers. He says they told him that his son was lying, and insisted that he recant. A board member at the time recalls Ochs telling him that it was a “terrible injustice” that any credence had been given to the allegation against Orr. (Neither Ochs nor Collins, both of whom remain on the Prep faculty, responded to requests for comment.) Even the head of the local province of the Jesuit Society—the order’s highest-ranking official in Maryland—sent a letter to members of the Prep community defending Orr’s reputation. Saying he felt “compelled” to “lay these rumors to rest,” the provincial assured Prep parents and alumni that Orr “has been and remains a priest in unquestioned good standing in the Church and the Society of Jesus.”

By January 2004, the situation escalated, with alumni waging a vicious and baseless smear campaign against Ruyak. In one e-mail that circulated within the Prep community, an alumnus claimed that “Eric flat-out admitted that he made the whole thing up.” The e-mail referenced Ruyak’s “rocky coming-out experience” as a possible motive—even though Ruyak had not yet come out—and expressed shock that he had not been expelled “for the lies he spread about Fr. Orr.” (Contacted today, the writer of the e-mail admits he had no basis for such claims, and is mortified that he wrote it.) As the rumor mill went into overdrive, the Ruyaks recall hearing all sorts of things: Eric was a sexual deviant; his parents had molested him; Eric was dying from AIDS.

By this point, Ruyak was emaciated, unable to sleep, and contemplating suicide. “I was the most reviled person in that community,” he recalls. “Most of the community was like, ‘He attacked this priest. He’s obviously sick.’ I was called every name in the book: faggot, liar.” His mother recalls the night he fell on the kitchen floor crying, “Why won’t they believe me?” Then he ran upstairs. Terrified of what he might do, she grabbed the anti-anxiety medication he had just been prescribed in therapy and made him take it.

Father George, a relative newcomer to the school, continued to support Eric, drawing heat from alumni for his refusal to “defend” Father Orr. “The only reason I wasn’t expelled,” Ruyak says, “was because of Father George.” But however supportive George was, he did not succeed at shutting down the nasty smear campaign against Ruyak. Eric had broken the code of silence, and he was being made to pay.

When asked today how the school handled the allegation of sexual abuse, Prep seemed unable to get its story straight. Initially, a spokesman for the school insisted that “from the moment it was brought to our attention,” Prep officials “immediately reported the incident to law enforcement and the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesuits.” In fact, the school’s own documentation demonstrates that Prep did not report the matter to police until May 2004—seven months after school officials learned of Ruyak’s accusation. (Schools in Maryland are required by law to report suspected abuse within 48 hours.) When Vanity Fairpointed out the discrepancy, Prep changed its story, claiming that it held off involving law enforcement at the insistence of Ruyak’s parents. Eric’s father, Robert, calls that claim “categorically false.” The Ruyaks say they wound up going to the police themselves—an assertion supported by Father Eck—and discovered that the school had not contacted the authorities.

In May 2004, the Jesuit provincial revoked Orr’s “priestly faculties,” meaning he could not act publicly as a priest, and barred him from having “one-on-one contact with students” at Loyola College, where he had transferred. This time, though, it did not bother to inform the Prep community of its actions, as it had when it defended Orr. By that point, though, the damage was done. Ruyak withdrew from classes, and with the help of a few concerned teachers, was allowed to finish high school from home. He matriculated to Northwestern the following fall.

Two years later, in April 2006, Ruyak received some belated vindication. In a letter to the Prep community, Father George, Eric’s primary ally, reported that an investigation by the Jesuit province had determined that Ruyak’s allegation against Orr was “substantially true.” Orr was barred from visiting Prep’s campus “for any reason,” and George said the school had strengthened its procedures “to ensure that no harm comes to our students.” He added that Prep “offers its support and prayers . . . to the victim and his family.”

The letter didn’t prompt much forgiveness or support for Ruyak among the Prep community. Kavanaugh’s classmate Mark Judge used the occasion to blast what he saw as the scourge of homosexuality and liberalism infecting Catholic schools. “Everyone there knew [Orr] was gay,” Judge told The Washington Times. “Which, combined with the leftist politics of the school and the rejection of official church teaching on sex, and you’re near 400 teenage boys, is a recipe for disaster.”

Then, in 2010, another of Orr’s victims came forward. A former Prep student told police that the priest had sexually abused him over the course of a semester in 1989, when he was 14 years old. On at least five occasions, according to a court transcript, Orr fondled the boy’s penis, and had the boy fondle his. Orr ended up pleading guilty to two counts of sexual offense in the fourth degree—including one for his molestation of Eric Ruyak. He was sentenced to five years of probation, and listed in the registry of convicted sex offenders.

One might assume that after Orr’s guilty plea, Ruyak would have received an apology from those who attacked his credibility, but that never happened. After the sentencing, Ruyak and his father went to Prep, hoping to meet with the new president. When they arrived, however, they say they were informed that the school’s attorney had advised Prep not to let anyone talk to Eric. (Prep says “so far as we can tell,” there was no “formal statement” to that effect.) “Holy shit,” Ruyak recalls thinking at the time. “I came forward about a predator at this school, and this is what happens?” Today he scoffs at the school’s lofty motto. “Men for others, my ass.”

Last July, after Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court, The Washington Post ran an article headlined, WITH BRETT KAVANAUGH, GEORGETOWN PREP CAN COUNT TWO SUPREME COURT NOMINEES AMONG ITS ALUMNI. The story quoted a teacher from Prep expounding on the school’s creed. “There’s an ethos that there’s a larger purpose in life,” the teacher said. “We’re called as part of our faith to try to make the world a better place.” The speaker was Stephen Ochs, who the Ruyaks say had accused Eric of lying.

Last fall, when rumors began circulating that an unnamed woman had contacted Senator Dianne Feinstein alleging that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her in high school, the Prep community immediately rallied to his defense. In a shrewd P.R. maneuver, the charge was led by two women: Maura Molloy Kane, part of the old “Visi girl” clique, and her younger sister, Meghan Molloy McCaleb, also a Visitation alum. The sisters were now married to two of Kavanaugh’s old friends, Tom Kane and Scott McCaleb. The Molloy family rules the roost in the Montgomery County Catholic community. Their younger sister, until recently, worked in admissions at Visitation. Their mother, Colleen, is assistant principal at School of the Most Blessed Sacrament, where Kavanaugh’s kids go to school and his family attends the church. As one source told me, “The Molloys are untouchable.”

Meghan McCaleb initiated a letter, circulated among a group of Visitation, Stone Ridge, and Holy Child alums, asking for them to add their names to a letter attesting to Kavanaugh’s character. Within a span of minutes, says one alum from the group, many women had signed—most without knowing the substance of the allegations against Kavanaugh. What’s more, two sources familiar with the letter estimate that three-quarters of the signees didn’t really know Kavanaugh, and weren’t in a position to attest to his actions as a young man.

On September 16, after Christine Blasey Ford reluctantly went public with her story, the Visi women mused on what they could remember about her. She went by Chrissy. She spent time at the Columbia Country Club. And she went to Holton-Arms. Another name quickly became part of the story: Mark Judge. According to Ford, he allegedly watched Kavanaugh pin her down, and then jumped on the bed so hard it caused all three to tumble off. The detail gave Ford’s story an eerie credibility. At least two Prep alums, Timothy Don and William Fishburne, who was student manager of the school’s football team, couldn’t help but remember how Judge was always leaping around and pouncing on people.

Among the Visi girls, a chill set in. Mark Judge had always been bad news—there was no denying it. One alum from the group says a kind of consensus emerged: something bad had happened to Ford that night. Most likely, they thought, Kavanaugh had blacked out and forgotten. But whatever doubts they had about their old friend Brett didn’t deter them. “He was one of their own,” says the Visitation alum, “and his close friends were going to do everything that they could to cover for him.” More than three decades later, Prep’s code of silence remained as strong as ever. Tom Kane, who went on CNN to defend Kavanaugh, summed up the time-honored ethos when he blurted out, “Boys will be boys.” He then scrambled to backpedal, saying “I hate that term.”

Prep alum who operate by a different ethos felt betrayed by Kavanaugh’s how-dare-you performance. “What I heard was, ‘I’m unwilling to own my truth, to own my history, and to accept that it’s possible that something in my past could have happened, and that people need to hear about it,’ ” says Bill Barbot, ’86. Similarly, Don says, “I was just appalled at the extent to which no one from the class was speaking up. Did anyone sit down with him—like, buy him a beer and say, ‘Hey, Brett, you need to think about this. I love you, I care about you, you’re a good person. Whatever went on there you need to face this head-on, this is important.’ ” To many Americans, Kavanaugh didn’t seem like a sexual predator—but that wasn’t the point. The point was that he couldn’t give an inch of possible culpability. He couldn’t say, “I’m sorry for what I might have done.”

In the days following the hearing, while senators frantically jockeyed, some in the elite ranks of the Montgomery County community considered breaking the code of silence. Barbot and another classmate initiated a letter among Prep alumni to support a thorough investigation into the allegations against Kavanaugh. They got roughly 80 men to sign, but discovered that many others were too scared to attach their names, for fear of social and professional retribution.

Georgetown Prep once again did its part. According to an alum, members of the administration whom he hadn’t heard from in years reached out to him. The overtures were friendly, but he interpreted the messages as reminders of the code. Reverend Van Dyke sent an initial letter to the Prep community that sounded, to many, defensive and tone-deaf. “There is no denying that this is a challenging time for a lot of reasons,” he wrote. But “Prep is a wonderful place, a wonderful school, a wonderful community.” Stung by criticism of the letter, Van Dyke followed up by writing a piece for a Jesuit journal, taking responsibility for the abhorrent yearbook.

In an e-mail to me, Georgetown Prep spokesman Patrick Coyle initially sounded a note of humility. “Yes, we have labored for years to protect students from a broader culture chockablock with degrading influences,” he wrote. “And yes, we are painfully aware that all our students, and indeed everyone in our community, sometimes fall short. Human failing, and the effort to reconcile our lives with the teachings of Christ, are at the very heart of our School.” Then, shifting to a different tone, he added, “It is no small irony . . . that the critique of our commitment to our mission is being questioned by a publication that routinely parades and promotes the promiscuity of American society.”

CORRECTIONS: An earlier version of this story misidentified the high school and college that Evie Shapiro attended. The story has also been amended to correctly identify the position that former Georgetown Prep student J. C. del Real played on the football team and the number of female teachers at the school in the 1982-83 academic year.

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