Republicans are proving to be as dense as usual on handling the fraught political development of an established college professor accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of assaulting her some 30 years ago. The timeless Senate presence known as Orrin Hatch called Kavanaugh's accuser, Prof. Christine Blasey Ford, "mixed up" as if not a moment had passed since the early '90s when Republicans botched the Anita Hill hearings so badly they sparked the Year of the Woman.
Another GOP brainiac, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), also floated some predictably misinformed gibberish. “The problem is, Dr. Ford can’t remember when it was, where it was, or how it came to be,” Cornyn told reporter Robert Costa. “There are some gaps there that need to be filled.”
Heckuva job, Johnny! Now how about we talk to some people who actually know something? The Washington Post spoke to several actual experts in sex-crimes prosecutions and here's a few relevant points that obliterate every low-information excuse Republicans are floating.
1. It's totally normal for someone to forget some details about an incident that took place 30 years ago.
The experts called Ford's account credible despite the fact that she can't recall all the circumstances surrounding the episode like exactly which house it was at.
“If she testifies, I would expect her to say ‘I don’t remember’ scores of times,” Linda Fairstein, former chief of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office’s Sex Crimes Bureau, told the Post of the trauma associated with such an experience. “She found this experience so upsetting that she felt her life was in danger. There might be 220 things she doesn’t know and then a very specific sentence about what happened that was so traumatic."
Here's the "very specific" things that are anchored in the memory of Ford, who's now 51, about an assault that took place when she was 15: Kavanaugh pinned her down, he groped her, and he cupped his hand over her mouth when she tried to scream.
“I thought he might inadvertently kill me," she told the Post in recollecting the incident. She also recalls the third person in the room, Mark Judge, and how she escaped when he jumped on her and Kavanaugh, momentarily toppling the trio and giving her a chance to run.
Another assault expert, psychologist Anne Meltzer, echoed Fairstein's sentiment, saying that what Ford doesn't recall isn't the issue. It's what she does remember and whether she can "clearly and consistently articulate" those details.
2. If you're lying, why place a third party in the room?
This was a simple tell for the experts. Most sexual assaults are truly a matter of he-said, she-said, but Ford very explicitly recalls the presence of Judge and how it actually saved her. “To me, it’s compelling that [Ford] puts someone else there, and that the person who happens to be in the room has a blackout drinking problem," Fairstein said of Judge, who authored a tell-all memoir called, Wasted: Tales of a Gen-X Drunk. Judge's presence adds credence to her claim that the two were "stumbling drunk."
But it's also a risk someone who was lying wouldn't take, noted former prosecutor Douglas Wigdor, who now represents sexual harassment victims in high-profile cases. “She put a third person in the room. If you were making something up, why would you do that?” he said.
3. There's nothing surprising about someone waiting 30 years to come forward, especially in such a public way.
Many sex abuse victims wait to come forward and many never do. “It’s one of the most common features of child sex abuse,” Meltzer explained, adding that they may fear retaliation, how they'll be perceived afterward, that they'll be blamed for what happened. She added that statistically teenagers come forward with less frequency than kids, partly because they're at an age where they worry about their image.
In Ford's case, she was 15 and it was the '80s, not exactly a women's lib decade by any means. In addition, Ford’s letter to her congressional member and interview with the Washington Post were by no means her first references to the assault. She told her husband, she told her therapist five years ago, she reached out to the Post over the summer before Kavanaugh had been named, she told friends around the same time that she was worried her name would go public even though she thought it was her civic duty to say something.
As Ford told one friend this summer: “I’ve been trying to forget this all my life, and now I’m supposed to remember every little detail.”
