The Republican line attacking Christine Blasey Ford is likely to be more or less this: “All we have is your word that Brett Kavanaugh pinned you to a bed and covered your mouth to keep you from screaming as he tried to rip your clothes off, and Kavanaugh denies it and his friend who was in the room backs him up, and anyway, that was 35 years ago and what boys do in high school doesn’t matter.” Republican refusal to understand that attempted rape in high school may not be something that’s prosecutable now but should at least disqualify someone from sitting on the nation’s highest court is on their heads—in the long term history will judge them and in the medium term it may enrage a few more women into voting for Democrats this November. But the “Ford’s word against Kavanaugh and his friend’s word” line … well, let’s talk about that.
First of all, for all the attempts to tear down Ford’s reputation and reliability as a witness that we are 100 percent sure to see from Republicans, consider whose word we’re supposed to take above hers. Brett Kavanaugh has lied his way through his confirmation hearing already. That he lies under oath is not some hypothetical mystery. It’s an established fact. Kavanaugh, we should remember, also strenuously advocated for the Starr investigation into then-President Bill Clinton to ask explicit questions because “It may not be our job to impose sanctions on him, but it is our job to make his pattern of revolting behavior clear—piece by painful piece.”
And Kavanaugh’s friend who Ford says was in the room? Yeah, about that guy. This is a guy who, decades later, wrote that:
Of course, a man must be able to read a woman’s signals, and it’s a good thing that feminism is teaching young men that no means no and yes means yes. But there’s also that ambiguous middle ground, where the woman seems interested and indicates, whether verbally or not, that the man needs to prove himself to her. And if that man is any kind of man, he’ll allow himself to feel the awesome power, the wonderful beauty, of uncontrollable male passion.
And a guy who deleted this YouTube page. A guy who back in high school chose a yearbook quote about hitting women. But sure, let’s take his word on whether or not he was a participant in attempted rape.
Leading the charge to defend Kavanaugh will be the Trump White House. Donald Trump is a man with a long list of sexual assault allegations against him. As Bob Woodward wrote in Fear, Trump has a strategy for responding to those allegations—and oh look, it’s the same strategy the White House is deploying here:
"You've got to deny, deny, deny and push back on these women," he said. "If you admit to anything and any culpability, then you're dead."
Ford was a teenage girl assaulted by two older boys at a party where there was drinking going on. She was afraid to tell her parents in part because she was worried she’d get in trouble for being at a party with alcohol. This is exactly how teenagers think. But also, as the rush by dozens of women to come to Kavanaugh’s defense shows, and as we’ve seen so many times in other cases, and as we’re going to see as this case plays out now, women who report sexual assault take a beating. People don’t believe them. People work to blame them. Most teenage girls who get assaulted as Ford did stay silent about it, for the same reasons she did.
Her word against his? Ford told two different therapists about the incident several years ago—it’s not like she just appeared out of the ether with this story last week. And for anyone who can put aside ingrained misogyny and sexism and think rationally about this, it’s clear that you believe the woman who’s about to be publicly vilified for being brave enough to tell her painful story over the man who has already shown us that he’ll lie again and again to get the job of a lifetime.
