Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on Thursday September 6, 2018. (photo: Washington Post/Getty Images)
17 September 18
arlier
this summer, Christine Blasey Ford wrote a confidential letter to a
senior Democratic lawmaker alleging that Supreme Court nominee Brett M.
Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her more than three decades ago, when they
were high school students in suburban Maryland. Since Wednesday, she has
watched as that bare-bones version of her story became public without
her name or her consent, drawing a blanket denial from Kavanaugh and roiling a nomination that just days ago seemed all but certain to succeed.
Now, Ford has decided that if her story is going to be told, she wants to be the one to tell it.
Speaking publicly for the first time, Ford said that
one summer in the early 1980s, Kavanaugh and a friend — both “stumbling
drunk,” Ford alleges — corralled her into a bedroom during a gathering
of teenagers at a house in Montgomery County.
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.
Ford said she told no one of the incident in any
detail until 2012, when she was in couples therapy with her husband. The
therapist’s notes, portions of which were provided by Ford and reviewed
by The Washington Post, do not mention Kavanaugh’s name but say she
reported that she was attacked by students “from an elitist boys’
school” who went on to become “highly respected and high-ranking members
of society in Washington.” The notes say four boys were involved, a
discrepancy Ford says was an error on the therapist’s part. Ford said
there were four boys at the party but only two in the room.
Notes from an individual therapy session the following
year, when she was being treated for what she says have been long-term
effects of the incident, show Ford described a “rape attempt” in her
late teens.
In an interview, her husband, Russell Ford, said that
in the 2012 sessions, she recounted being trapped in a room with two
drunken boys, one of whom pinned her to a bed, molested her and
prevented her from screaming. He said he recalled that his wife used
Kavanaugh’s last name and voiced concern that Kavanaugh — then a federal
judge — might one day be nominated to the Supreme Court.
On Sunday, the White House sent The Post a statement
Kavanaugh issued last week, when the outlines of Ford’s account became
public: “I categorically and unequivocally deny this allegation. I did
not do this back in high school or at any time.”
Through a White House spokesman, Kavanaugh declined to
comment further on Ford’s allegation and did not respond to questions
about whether he knew her during high school. The White House had no
additional comment.
Reached by email Sunday, Judge declined to comment. In an interview
Friday with The Weekly Standard, before Ford’s name was known, he
denied that any such incident occurred. “It’s just absolutely nuts. I
never saw Brett act that way,” Judge said. He told the New York Times that Kavanaugh was a “brilliant student” who loved sports and was not “into anything crazy or illegal.”
Christine Ford is a professor at Palo Alto University
who teaches in a consortium with Stanford University, training graduate
students in clinical psychology. Her work has been widely published in
academic journals.
She contacted The Post through a tip line in early
July, when it had become clear that Kavanaugh was on the shortlist of
possible nominees to replace retiring justice Anthony M. Kennedy but
before Trump announced his name publicly. A registered Democrat who has
made small contributions to political organizations, she contacted her
congresswoman, Democrat Anna G. Eshoo, around the same time. In late
July, she sent a letter via Eshoo’s office to Sen. Dianne Feinstein of
California, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee.
In the letter, which was read to The Post, Ford
described the incident and said she expected her story to be kept
confidential. She signed the letter as Christine Blasey, the name she
uses professionally.
Though Ford had contacted The Post, she declined to
speak on the record for weeks as she grappled with concerns about what
going public would mean for her and her family — and what she said was
her duty as a citizen to tell the story.
She engaged Debra Katz, a Washington lawyer known for
her work on sexual harassment cases. On the advice of Katz, who said she
believed Ford would be attacked as a liar if she came forward, Ford
took a polygraph test administered by a former FBI agent in early
August. The results, which Katz provided to The Post, concluded that
Ford was being truthful when she said a statement summarizing her
allegations was accurate.
By late August, Ford had decided not to come forward,
calculating that doing so would upend her life and probably would not
affect Kavanaugh’s confirmation. “Why suffer through the annihilation if
it’s not going to matter?” she said.
Her story leaked anyway. On Wednesday, the Intercept reported
that Feinstein had a letter describing an incident involving Kavanaugh
and a woman while they were in high school and that Feinstein was
refusing to share it with her Democratic colleagues.
Feinstein soon released a statement:
“I have received information from an individual concerning the
nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court,” she wrote. “That
individual strongly requested confidentiality, declined to come forward
or press the matter further, and I have honored that decision. I have,
however, referred the matter to federal investigative authorities.”
The FBI redacted Ford’s name and sent the letter to
the White House to be included in Kavanaugh’s background file, according
to a Judiciary Committee aide. The White House sent it to the Senate
Judiciary Committee, making it available to all senators.
As pressure grew, the New York Times reported that the incident involved “possible sexual misconduct.”
By then, Ford had begun to fear she would be exposed.
People were clearly learning her identity: A BuzzFeed reporter visited
her at her home and tried to speak to her as she was leaving a classroom
where she teaches graduate students. Another reporter called her
colleagues to ask about her.
On Friday, the New Yorker reported the
letter’s contents but did not reveal Ford’s identity. Soon after,
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa)
released a letter from
65 women who say they knew Kavanaugh when he attended high school from
1979 to 1983 at Georgetown Prep, an all-boys school in North Bethesda.
“Through the more than 35 years we have known him,
Brett has stood out for his friendship, character, and integrity,” the
women wrote. “In particular, he has always treated women with decency
and respect. That was true when he was in high school, and it has
remained true to this day.”
As the story snowballed, Ford said, she heard people
repeating inaccuracies about her and, with the visits from reporters,
felt her privacy being chipped away. Her calculation changed.
“These are all the ills that I was trying to avoid,”
she said, explaining her decision to come forward. “Now I feel like my
civic responsibility is outweighing my anguish and terror about
retaliation.”
Katz said she believes Feinstein honored Ford’s request to keep her allegation confidential, but “regrettably others did not.”
“Victims must have the right to decide whether to come
forward, especially in a political environment that is as ruthless as
this one,” Katz said. “She will now face vicious attacks by those who
support this nominee.”
After so many years, Ford said, she does not remember
some key details of the incident. She said she believes it occurred in
the summer of 1982, when she was 15, around the end of her sophomore
year at the all-girls Holton-Arms School in Bethesda. Kavanaugh would
have been 17 at the end of his junior year at Georgetown Prep.
At the time, Ford said, she knew Kavanaugh and Judge
as “friendly acquaintances” in the private-school social circles of
suburban Maryland. Her Holton-Arms friends mostly hung out with boys
from the Landon School, she said, but for a period of several months
socialized regularly with students from Georgetown Prep.
Ford said she does not remember how the gathering came
together the night of the incident. She said she often spent time in
the summer at the Columbia Country Club pool in Chevy Chase, where in
those pre-cellphone days, teenagers learned about gatherings via word of
mouth. She also doesn’t recall who owned the house or how she got
there.
Ford said she remembers that it was in Montgomery
County, not far from the country club, and that no parents were home at
the time. Ford named two other teenagers who she said were at the party.
Those individuals did not respond to messages on Sunday morning.
She said she recalls a small family room where she and
a handful of others drank beer together that night. She said that each
person had one beer but that Kavanaugh and Judge had started drinking
earlier and were heavily intoxicated.
In his senior-class yearbook entry at Georgetown Prep,
Kavanaugh made several references to drinking, claiming membership to
the “Beach Week Ralph Club” and “Keg City Club.” He and Judge are
pictured together at the beach in a photo in the yearbook.
Judge is a filmmaker and author who has written for the Daily Caller, the Weekly Standard and The Post.
He chronicled his recovery from alcoholism in “Wasted: Tales of a Gen-X
Drunk,” which described his own blackout drinking and a culture of
partying among students at his high school, renamed in the book “Loyola
Prep.”
Kavanaugh is not mentioned in the book, but a passage about
partying at the beach one summer makes glancing reference to a “Bart
O’Kavanaugh,” who “puked in someone’s car the other night” and “passed
out on his way back from a party.”
Through the White House, Kavanaugh did not respond to a question about whether the name was a pseudonym for him.
Ford said that on the night of the party, she left the
family room to use the bathroom, which was at the top of a narrow
stairway. She doesn’t remember whether Kavanaugh and Judge were behind
her or already upstairs, but she remembers being pushed into a bedroom
and then onto a bed. Rock-and-roll music was playing with the volume
turned up high, she said.
She alleges that Kavanaugh — who played football and
basketball at Georgetown Prep — held her down with the weight of his
body and fumbled with her clothes, seemingly hindered by his
intoxication. Judge stood across the room, she said, and both boys were
laughing “maniacally.” She said she yelled, hoping that someone
downstairs would hear her over the music, and Kavanaugh clapped his hand
over her mouth to silence her.
At one point, she said, Judge jumped on top of them,
and she tried unsuccessfully to wriggle free. Then Judge jumped on them
again, toppling them, and she broke away, she said.
She said she locked herself in the bathroom and
listened until she heard the boys “going down the stairs, hitting the
walls.” She said that after five or 10 minutes, she unlocked the door
and made her way through the living room and outside. She isn’t sure how
she got home.
Ford said she has not spoken with Kavanaugh since that
night. And she told no one at the time what had happened to her. She
was terrified, she said, that she would be in trouble if her parents
realized she had been at a party where teenagers were drinking, and she
worried they might figure it out even if she did not tell them.
“My biggest fear was, do I look like someone just
attacked me?” she said. She said she recalled thinking: “I’m not ever
telling anyone this. This is nothing, it didn’t happen, and he didn’t
rape me.”
Years later, after going through psychotherapy, Ford
said, she came to understand the incident as a trauma with lasting
impact on her life.
“I think it derailed me substantially for four or five
years,” she said. She struggled academically and socially, she said,
and was unable to have healthy relationships with men. “I was very
ill-equipped to forge those kinds of relationships.”
She also said that in the longer term, it contributed
to anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms with which she
has struggled.
She married her husband in 2002. Early in their
relationship, she told him she had been a victim of physical abuse, he
said. A decade later, he learned the details of that alleged abuse when
the therapist asked her to tell the story, he said.
He said he expects that some people, upon hearing his
wife’s account, will believe that Kavanaugh’s high school behavior has
no bearing upon his fitness for the nation’s high court. He disagrees.
“I think you look to judges to be the arbiters of
right and wrong,” Russell Ford said. “If they don’t have a moral code of
their own to determine right from wrong, then that’s a problem. So I
think it’s relevant. Supreme Court nominees should be held to a higher
standard.”
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