Christine Blasey Ford’s house has two front doors.
Her testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday might have been composed largely of patchy 36-year-old memories, but the two doors are a fact. “Our house doesn’t look that attractive from the front,” Prof. Blasey Ford said during Brett Kavanaugh’s U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearings.
The doors came up right at the beginning of the day, in Prof. Blasey Ford’s opening statement. It was a marital disagreement over building the second, she said, that led her to discuss the specifics of a sexual assault she said she experienced as a teenager in the early 1980s.
Decades later, in 2012, she and her husband were working through their door disagreement in couples therapy. “In explaining why I wanted to have a second front door, I described the assault in detail,” Prof. Blasey Ford said.
Those details included allegedly being trapped in a bedroom by two older teenage boys during a house party; having one grope her, cover her mouth with his hand, and attempt to remove her clothing while the other watched; hiding out in a small bathroom after escaping them; and having to walk by them later on to leave the house by its single front door.
“I recall saying that the boy who assaulted me could someday be on the U.S. Supreme Court and spoke a bit about his background,” she said. “My husband recalls that I named my attacker as Brett Kavanaugh.”
The doors were one of many intimate, particular details in Prof. Blasey Ford’s testimony, which she shared with 21 senators – including 11 Republican men, since the party has never appointed a woman to the committee. The soft-spoken but strong-willed psychology professor told of living through a four-year period of intense trauma after the attack, as well as lifelong experiences of anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, claustrophobia and a fear of flying.
More than once, she returned to an unforgettable memory: “the laughter, the uproarious laughter” of, allegedly, Justice Kavanaugh and the friend she says watched the incident, a man named Mark Judge.
“I was underneath one of them, while the two laughed. Two friends having a really good time with one another,” she said.
Prof. Blasey Ford seemed honest, believable and real through her entire testimony, often holding back tears. Afterward, even Republicans couldn’t really fault her. Senator Lindsey Graham called her “a nice lady,” even if her “hard story … is uncorroborated.”
Other Republicans also decried the lack of corroboration, as though they weren’t the ones refusing to publicly question the one person who could confirm – or disprove – her story. That would be Mr. Judge, who became friends with Justice Kavanaugh when both were students at the elite Georgetown Prep high school.
Mr. Judge, who was also a guest at Justice Kavanaugh’s wedding, has submitted a letter to the committee stating that he doesn’t remember the alleged incident, but he hasn’t been subpoenaed to testify. He’s reportedly holed up in a beach house in Delaware, not being made to reiterate his story or defend it, or to describe his old friend’s character.
Meanwhile, the content of that character has been in question since the allegations became public. Early on, the nominee tried to paint himself as a moderate drinker, but a number of former high-school and university classmates disputed that, telling media that he was, in fact, often severely inebriated.
The image of a drunken, belligerent Justice Kavanaugh lines up neatly with the raucous, hard-partying “Bart O’Kavanaugh” populating Mr. Judge’s memoirs – not to mention the belligerent, shouting Justice Kavanaugh who screwed up his mouth in fury during his own testimony Thursday afternoon.
During that testimony, Justice Kavanaugh tried to deny that he and his high-school friends, including Mr. Judge, made a classmate named Renate the butt of their jokes and sexual innuendo. It was a weak denial, one that Renate herself has rejected, but again, one that Mr. Judge could illuminate.
More darkly, Mr. Judge’s ex-girlfriend has indicated that she’ll testify he once confessed to participating in a group sexual encounter with an intoxicated woman. That’s eerily reminiscent of the story of another woman accusing Justice Kavanaugh, Julia Swetnick, who said both men were present at multiple parties where “gang rapes” took place in their youth.
Many sexual-assault cases are genuine “he said, she said” situations, where only two people are present: the alleged victim and the supposed attacker. But it’s untruthful to paint this incident this way when Prof. Blasey Ford has said all along – even before Justice Kavanaugh was eligible for the Supreme Court – that another person, Mr. Judge, was a witness.
To have Prof. Blasey Ford endure public scrutiny while Mr. Judge hides affirms assumptions that this process was merely for show. Without a chance for the public to hear the whole story, this historic moment will remain forever incomplete.
In her opening statement to a U.S. Senate hearing, Christine Blasey Ford detailed an alleged sexual assault in 1982 by Brett Kavanaugh. The Supreme Court nominee strenuously denied the allegation in his opening remarks.