Sen. Susan Collins of Maine was the deciding vote to place accused sexual assaulter Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court for life. Saying she believed Dr. Christine Blasey Ford had been assaulted, Collins went on to say that she just didn’t believe it was Brett Kavanaugh who committed the crime. For millions of women, it was a rage-inducing statement. Dr. Ford was credible, believable, 100 percent certain that Brett Kavanaugh was her attacker. Dr. Ford recalled those little details that stood out in her mind, especially the laughter of the two men who participated. Being a doctor of psychology, Dr. Ford explained how the brain locks onto certain memories during traumatic events. In her testimony, she described how the the laughter of Brett Kavanaugh and Mark Judge was seared in her memory.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, asked her to describe "the strongest memory" she had of the alleged incident, "something that you cannot forget?”
Ford responded, "Indelible in the hippocampus, it was the laughter. The uproarious laughter between the two."
"I was underneath one of them while the two of them laughed," she added. "Two friends having a really good time with one another."
As if that weren’t distressing enough, buckle up! Because Twitter user @nycsouthpaw reminds us of a 2015 article in Politico, in which Susan Collins describes her time as a freshman senator. Strom Thurmond, a powerful Republican senator from South Carolina, had a well-known history of sexually harassing women in the Senate. After Strom Thurmond groped Sen. Patty Murray’s breast on an elevator, Collins was warned to steer clear of such interactions with Thurmond. How does Collins remember her own elevator run-in with Thurmond? Because of the laughter. The laughter of her male colleague is seared in her memory.
So notoriously predatory was Thurmond that when Susan Collins came to the Senate in 1997, she was warned to avoid getting on an elevator alone with him. A Republican from Maine, Collins describes publicly for the first time being headed for the senators-only elevator and seeing Thurmond walking in the same direction. She did a U-turn and took the stairs. “The reason I remember the incident so well is because it was observed by one of my Republican male colleagues,” recalls Collins. He “started laughing because he knew exactly why I was turning around and not getting on the elevator.”
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