The sex assault allegations haunting Brett Kavanaugh

“If Franz Kafka had written about confirmation hearings, he couldn’t have come up with a better scenario than the one now unfolding in the US Senate,” said Rich Lowry in the New York Post. It centres on Brett Kavanaugh, whose nomination to join America’s highest court was sensationally cast into doubt last week by a sexual assault allegation. A 51-year-old psychology professor named Christine Blasey Ford has come forward, claiming that Kavanaugh tried to force himself on her at a high school party more than three decades ago. She can’t remember where or when the alleged attack happened, although she thinks it might have been in 1982. The charge is vague and uncorroborated, yet it’s also “almost impossible to definitively rebut”. Since it was made, at least one other allegation has emerged.

There rarely is hard evidence in cases like these, but I, for one, believe Ford, said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. She has passed a lie detector test and produced notes from a therapist she saw back in 2012, in which she talked of such an incident. What’s more, she only came forward after her name was leaked to the press. Conservatives are furious, insisting that Kavanaugh did nothing wrong and that, even if he did, “it’s unfair to judge a middle-aged man for things he did as a kid”. It would be darkly fitting if the Republicans force Kavanaugh’s nomination through despite the cloud around him. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority will finally be able to strip women of their constitutional right to an abortion, all because a president who has boasted of sexual assault nominated an “ex-frat boy credibly accused of attempted rape”.

There are no good endings to this story, said Jonah Goldberg in National Review. If Ford is telling the truth, she won’t get proper justice; at most, she’ll just thwart Kavanaugh’s promotion. And if Kavanaugh is telling the truth, he has suffered a “character assassination”. The one thing we can say for sure is that Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, “has behaved outrageously”. She knew about these allegations in July, but waited until the end of Kavanaugh’s hearings to spring this surprise, no doubt hoping to delay his confirmation until the midterm elections. What a cynical move. “Congratulations, Senator Feinstein, you’ve done the unimaginable: you’ve made our politics even uglier.”