Christine Blasey Ford should be believed whether or not she has damning evidence and people who can corroborate. She should be believed regardless of her race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, level of educational attainment, or support of her male partner.
Blasey Ford should be believed because we must believe people who come forward to allege sexual assault. Here, I address her situation, that of a privileged cis, white woman. That’s not to erase the experiences of others. Consider that in 2015 the National Center for Transgender Equality found that almost one-half of respondents to a national survey reported being sexually assaulted in their lifetime.
For every survivor of sexual assault, there are far more barriers to reporting assault than safe avenues of recourse.
Even in the midst of #MeToo, it is still terrifying for any person to come out against an accuser. Try being 15 in the early 1980s, a girl, thinking you don’t “look” like you were assaulted, imagining your parents’ wrath and how quickly your life will fall apart if you speak out against a popular, privileged white boy.
Early in their marriage, which took place in 2002, Blasey Ford told her partner she’d been physically abused. In couples therapy 10 years later, at a therapist’s prompting, she recounted details, including Kavanaugh’s name. Blasey Ford was already scared this day would come. She was able to expand on those details later that year in an individual session.
How do we know? Blasey Ford shared her therapist’s notes. The only purported discrepancy is minor, exactly the sort of slip a therapist might make as they attempted to take notes while staying present with a patient recounting a formative trauma for the first time. The notes say four boys assaulted her; what she said, she maintains, was that four boys attended the party.
“Taking notes in session means you are necessarily splitting your attention,” says a therapist friend. “You can easily get details wrong under the circumstances.” Information that’s less relevant to treatment is the least likely to be recorded, or recorded accurately, she tells me. “If a patient of mine is abused, I will probably be attending to the emotional damage incurred to my patient, less so to how many attackers incurred it.”
Blasey Ford spent months trying to share her story without sacrificing her privacy. It was July when she went to her Congress member, Rep. Anna Eshoo, and sent a letter on to Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California. She hired a sexual harassment attorney and even opted for a polygraph test administered by a former FBI agent that confirmed her account.
What Blasey Ford describes as her experience and the time it took to recognize and address sexual trauma is beyond familiar. It’s textbook—for those who, when we’re able to voice it, are lucky enough to be supported, to be believed, but must confront the norms and structures of rape culture.
Lawyers can tell you that’s true. So can law enforcement officers, so can advocates, and so can physicians, psychologists, and therapists. It’s rarer that a survivor comes forward in the week following an assault than not.
Common sense suffices. In the Washington Post, Rachel Sklar gives an achingly understandable account of why it is that Blasey Ford, and other survivors of assault, fear disclosure.
Women who dare to come forward to report stories of being sexually molested find their stories doubted, their behavior questioned, their credibility impugned. Did they imagine it? Do it for the attention? Were they lying about it (because reporting sexual assault is always the path to riches and respect, right?) Why didn’t they stop it? The litany of responses is familiar by now: You were flirting, weren’t you? What were you wearing? My, that was a short skirt. Wait, were you drinking? Boys will be boys! Hi from the locker room!
This is grotesquely magnified when accusations are leveled at famous or powerful men.
What Blasey Ford faces now is an extreme, national, and highly public version of very familiar attacks on survivors for reporting an assault.
Blasey Ford risked her life—if we think about what makes our lives normal, comfortable, and private—to ensure the Senate had this information. She guarded her privacy. Her identity was leaked, not announced; she’s not in it for attention, an odious notion in any case. When it became clear it would be necessary for her allegations to be taken seriously, that they would matter—which she doubted after her interactions with her congressional offices—she agreed to testify.
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It’s Kavanaugh’s credibility, not Blasey Ford’s, that’s weak. It’s weak not just with respect to her account, but on any number of issues. With any other Senate, his perjuries would already have disqualified him.
Most relevant: His facially false claim that, despite his prodigious memory and obvious admiration for the man, he couldn’t recall reading inappropriate emails former Judge Alex Kozinski, he of sexual harassment fame, sent to a list of friends—nor witnessed any inappropriate behavior. It’s just not possible. This is the man, by the way, who at Kavanaugh’s request introduced him to the Senate for his appellate confirmation.
The best he offered in the vein of being a champion of women was a roster of clerks and preteen basketball players, trotted out to pacify those rightly worried about what Kavanaugh would mean for women.
The only party-goer to comment on Blasey Ford’s allegation has been Mark Judge, whom she named as her second alleged assailant. Initially, he said only “I have no recollection.” That’s a.) not a denial and b.) chilling. Not that we’re lacking for evidence that he has no regard for women’s bodily autonomy and safety.
After his high school days alongside Kavanaugh, Judge would go on to write trash—in both content and style—like this.
Judge has aired his views on sex and consent widely.
Jessica Valenti has it right, as always.
Follow Valenti’s thread for additional damning evidence of Judge’s misogyny.
Doubting the connection between Brett and Mark? In Judge’s memoir, Wasted: Tales of a GenX Drunk, there’s a “Bart O’Kavanaugh” who pukes his guts out. That’s closer to a typo than a pseudonym.
Friends, this is his character witness.
The biggest, latest cue that Brett’s in trouble? He’s hired Beth Wilkinson, a tough-as-nails litigator. It’s odd in that she primarily practices corporate law now, but her record includes representing four Clinton staffers and prosecuting Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
The optical angle is about as subtle as his perjury: He’s hiring a woman to defend him from another woman’s allegations.
Of course, Kavanaugh may not just be worrying about the nomination process: Maryland has no statute of limitations on felonies, and first and second-degree rape are most certainly felonies.
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Republicans’ cure for Blasey Ford’s allegation: A letter orchestrated by a close friend and signed by 65 women blandly endorsing Kavanaugh’s character. As I suggested on Saturday, there are real timeline problems with that—as in, women were asked to sign the letter before the allegations became public. When Politico reporters attempted to reach signatories, five stood by Brett, two declined to comment, and more than two dozen, they say, refused to respond.
The woman who coordinated the 65-women-in-defense-of-Brett campaign is an apologist, or even accomplice, in more ways than one. She’s joked with Mark Judge on Twitter about “youthful” and “oldful” indiscretions on Twitter. Just guessing she’s of the “locker room talk” school.
By the way, more than 200 alumnae of Blasey Ford’s high school have declared their support for her, if we’re just counting signatures.
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Imagine having spent years coping with unrealized post-traumatic stress, years facing that trauma, years building a life, then coming forward against a Supreme Court nominee. Imagine knowing what still happens to those who come forward, and doing it anyway.
We all know what kinds of things men like Donald Trump, Jr. do.
Still, she persisted.
Blasey Ford contacted two members of Congress. Her representative and senator failed her. We must not. Nor can we fail any other women who come forward, which Feinstein’s latest comments suggest as a possibility.
We must believe Christine Blasey Ford and every person like her who, regardless of their context or their alleged assailants, takes the courageous step of coming forward. We must investigate. That’s basic due process. That’s recognizing human dignity.
Believe us.