The accuser of Brett Kavanaugh now has a name: Christine Blasey Ford. And the details, such as they are, are now in a Washington Post article:
While his friend watched, she said, Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed on her back and groped her over her clothes, grinding his body against hers and clumsily attempting to pull off her one-piece bathing suit and the clothing she wore over it. When she tried to scream, she said, he put his hand over her mouth.
“I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” said Ford, now a 51-year-old research psychologist in northern California. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.”
Ford said she was able to escape when Kavanaugh’s friend and classmate at Georgetown Preparatory School, Mark Judge, jumped on top of them, sending all three tumbling. She said she ran from the room, briefly locked herself in a bathroom and then fled the house.
She reports never having told anyone but the time but
Years later, after going through psychotherapy, Ford said, she came to understand the incident as a trauma with lasting impact on her life.
and therapist’s notes dated as 2012, appear to corroborate her story.
Here are some possible explanations:
1. She made it up entirely. Reports are that her social media presence has been erased — and so completely that even her Linkedin account is now “Christine B.” at Stanford. Is that because she wanted to not only eliminate the opportunity to harass her, but also to hide her political causes? There’s no way of knowing. But given the level of extreme rhetoric, that Kavanaugh would be the source of untold deaths due to the overturning of Roe v. Wade and finding for plaintiffs in a lawsuit seeking to end pre-existing condition insurance coverage protections, and would result in unchecked corruption at the White House, and all manner of other dire consequences, it’s not hard to believe that someone would be convinced that the situation calls for an accusation like this, with respect to someone that she had a passing acquaintance with in high school. Yes, her husband and therapist are in on it, too. Are the therapists’ notes provably from 2012?
Yes, I agree, this is unlikely. But there has been so much sensationalist rhetoric that I suspect there are a significant number of people who, if they thought they had the chance, would feel it perfectly justified to falsify a claim if they felt it would protect all of the potential victims of a Kavanaugh Supreme Court decision.
2. Something happened, with some boy whose identity she hadn’t really remembered, but she made the association with Kavanaugh so many years after the fact because of his appearances in the news, either prior to the 2012 therapist’s sessions (if she told him the name at the time) or just now (if she only connected the nameless high school boy to Kavanaugh when he made the news). Whether the details are even as she recalls them, or whether, with the passage of time, this event, which was a formative event in her life, unintentionally evolved into something quite different, we can’t know.
3. Kavanaugh was indeed the drunk boy, but he didn’t really get any further than first base and we can’t really say whether, had his friend not stopped him (because the details are confusing but it seems more like the friend was stopping rather than trying to join in on the whatever-was-happening), he would have actually raped her. As to his denial, he could be truthful, that is, have the intent of being truthful if (a) he was black-out drunk and/or (b) if his perception of what happened was so radically different than hers that it wasn’t a memorable event to him, so that in his mind, he never did any such thing.
4. Kavanaugh was drunk, but not so drunk as to not be in full control of his actions and remember everything, and intended to catch her alone and rape her, remembers everything and is lying now.
But how — how on earth — do we respond to this? If we believe her, but it’s actually not true, then an injustice is perpetrated on Kavanaugh, and we’ve created an environment in which people can fabricate 11th-hour accusations with impunity. If we believe him, and he’s lying then we have a Supreme Court justice who, in the worst case, was a rapist, and won’t own up to it (e.g., “I treated girls unjustly in high school, but then I learned this was wrong”).
Now maybe in the former case we say, “no one has a right to Supreme Court confirmation, so there’s no actual injustice happening,” but it sets a very disturbing precedent that one can destroy a potential confirmation with last-minute unproven accuastion. Where does this end?
And it doesn’t appear that we’ll get much corroborative or exculpatory evidence, either. The story doesn’t quite hang together: the therapist’s notes say four boys in the attack, she says the notes were wrong and there were merely four boys at the party. The other boy is described as being a second perpetrator, but the action of “jumping on” Ford and Kavanaugh reads more as disrupting than anything else. But I don’t think this proves that it’s a false accusation. There is no date other than probably summer of 1982. We know of no one else at the party, which is reasonable enough — some of us can just scroll through our Facebook friends list to find high school classmates, but it’s hardly evidence of anything if Ford can’t or didn’t. And the absence of other accusers doesn’t in itself prove anything, either.
But that also means that claims that “this should be investigated” aren’t really going to get anywhere. What is there to investigate? Maybe I lack enough imagination to see how an investigation could turn up more information. There’s so little to go on: some party in the summer, at someone’s house. Maybe someone’s already gone to the media saying, “I was there; I remember this” but one presumes that, if this was a party no different than countless others these teenagers attended, then these teenagers are unlikely to remember anything distinctive about this one, let alone anything as specific as “she went upstairs, the boys followed her, then she never came back.” Is it a matter of having Ford testify? — I’m not sure that this would be meaningful, if it just means that senators, and the public, are called on to make their decision based on how sympathetic a witness she appears to be.
So where do we go from here? Should Kavanaugh be pulled from the nomination for avoidance of doubt? Or would the Democrats find similar reasons to disqualify any alternative nominee?
I’m interested in what readers think — but not if you hated Kavanaugh and are happy for this matter to have come up, because that’s not particularly meaningful.
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Judge_Brett_Michael_Kavanaugh.jpg; By U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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