The Devil’s Triangle by Mark Judge

In 2018, in the midst of a contentious Supreme Court confirmation battle, Christine Blasey Ford named Mark Judge as a witness to her alleged attempted rape over thirty years earlier at the hands of a teenaged Brett Kavanaugh.

Overnight, the unassuming writer, critic, videographer, and recovering alcoholic was unwillingly thrust into the national media spotlight. Reporters combed through Judge’s writings, pored over his high school yearbook, hounded him with emails and phone calls, and invaded the privacy of his relatives, friends, and former girlfriends. He was mauled in the press, denounced in the Senate, received threatening late-night calls, became the target of a classic honey trap, and was even called out by Matt Damon on Saturday Night Live. 

As the lunacy reached its crescendo, Judge began to fear for his sanity ⎯ and even his life.

A year later, still traumatized by this Kafkaesque experience, Judge found himself washing dishes in a Maryland restaurant, trying to piece his shattered life back together.

Even at the time, it was clear that Judge himself was not the target of this campaign of vilification. Instead, it was an attempt to use his spotty record as a teenage alcoholic, and later, a political and cultural conservative, to destroy Brett Kavanaugh by proxy. The actors in this malicious and cynical plot were an informal cabal of partisan reporters, Democrats in Congress, and shadowy opposition researchers: a “Devil’s Triangle” whom Judge aptly compares to the Stasi, the dreaded East German secret police who terrorized citizens during the Cold War.

Now, in a frank, confessional, and deeply moving book that stands comparison to Arthur Koestler’s Cold War classic Darkness at Noon, Judge rips the mask from the new American Stasi. Using pop culture, politics, the story of his friendship with Kavanaugh, and the fun, wild, and misunderstood 1980s, Judge celebrates sex, art, and freedom while issuing a timely warning to the rest of us about our own endangered freedoms.