The woman who accused U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of attempted rape will testify, she says, and President Trump’s top counsellor, Kellyanne Conway, thinks senators must hear the woman’s story.
On Sunday, the Washington Post revealed Christine Blasey Ford as Kavanaugh’s accuser in a story with many more details. But Ford, a psychology professor at Palo Alto University, admits she can’t remember key details of the night she claims Kavanaugh assaulted her.
Last week, Ford’s charges surfaced in the media when Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) sent a letter to the FBI that turned up in a short, cloudy story under Ronan Farrow’s name in the New Yorker.
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The story began with a vague passage from Farrow that said Kavanaugh “attempted to force himself on her” and “covered her mouth with his hand.” The woman freed herself unharmed, but “said that the memory had been a source of ongoing distress” requiring therapy.
Kavanaugh heatedly denied the charge, as did his friend, conservative writer Mark Judge. “I never saw anything like what was described,” Judge told the New York Times, echoing that statement for the Weekly Standard.
In revealing herself, Ford offered more details to the Washington Post, claiming that Kavanaugh and Judge were “stumbling drunk” and “corralled her into a bedroom” during a party in Montgomery County,” Maryland.
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…. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.”
Ford escaped Kavanaugh when 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 kept the story secret until “2012, when she was in couples therapy with her husband.”
He claims that she named Kavanaugh and “voiced concern that Kavanaugh — then a federal judge — might one day be nominated to the Supreme Court.”
One problem with Ford’s story is her memory: “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.”
She “does not remember how the gathering came together the night of the incident…. She also doesn’t recall who owned the house or how she got there.”
The woman “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.”
The Post continued:
She left the family room to use the bathroom…. 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 alleges that Kavanaugh … 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.
Conway: Deserves To Be Heard
Now, Ford is ready to testify, her lawyer says, and White House counselor Conway says senators are obliged to listen to her story. “This woman should not be insulted, and she should not be ignored,” Conway said on Fox & Friends. “She ought to be heard.” The committee vote on Kavanaugh is September 25.
More than five dozen women who know Kavanaugh signed a letter supporting him.
As for Kavanaugh, he released a second statement denying the woman’s accusation. “This is a completely false allegation,” CNN’s Jake Tapper reported. “I have never done anything like what the accuser describes — to her or to anyone…. I am willing to talk to the Senate Judiciary Committee in any way the Committee deems appropriate to refute this false allegation, from 36 years ago, and defend my integrity.”
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