Christine Blasey Ford
reinvented her life in California, but it wasn’t far enough away to leave behind her past. Now Kavanaugh’s accuser has reached a tentative deal to publicly testify.
When Donald Trump won his upset presidential victory in 2016, Christine Blasey Ford’s thoughts quickly turned to a name most Americans had never heard of but one that had unsettled her for years: Brett Kavanaugh.
Kavanaugh — a judge on the prestigious U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia — was among those mentioned as a possible replacement for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016. When Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch, Ford was relieved but still uneasy.
Then Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement and Ford, 51, began fretting again.
“Her mindset was, ‘I’ve got this terrible secret. … What am I going to do with this secret?’ ” her husband, Russell Ford, 56, recalled.
To many, Kavanaugh was a respected jurist. To her, he was the teenager who had attacked her when they were in high school.
Ford had already moved 3,000 miles away from the affluent Maryland suburbs where she says Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a house party — a charge he would emphatically deny. Suddenly, living in California didn’t seem far enough. Maybe another hemisphere would be. She went online to research other democracies where her family might settle, including New Zealand.
“She was like, ‘I can’t deal with this. If he becomes the nominee, then I’m moving to another country. I cannot live in this country if he’s in the Supreme Court,’ ” her husband said. “She wanted out.”
These were the lengths that Ford, a professor and mother of two, once considered to avoid revisiting one of her most troubling memories — one she’d discussed only in therapy and with her husband. Instead, her deeply held secret would come to dominate the headlines, putting her and her family at the center of an explosive debate about the future of the Supreme Court.
Now, as she prepares to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Ford’s truthfulness is under attack across social media and by the president himself. Death threats have poured in. Her email was hacked.
The family was separated for days, with the boys staying with friends and their parents living at a hotel. They’ve looked into a security service to escort their children to school.
While Ford met the FBI on Friday to discuss her safety, critics continued questioning her motives and memory. Why, they ask, did she wait decades to come forward? Trump joined the chorus on Twitter, declaring, “I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents.”
As senators weigh Kavanaugh’s confirmation, the endless news cycle has pried into every corner of his accuser’s life to find out who Christine Blasey Ford really is.
The answer is someone much different than who she was. In Bethesda, Md., Ford’s life was one of cloistered advantage, with her time spent at a private school for girls, at the Columbia Country Club and at parties where she moved easily among the privileged and popular.
She successfully reinvented herself far from the place where her family is known, where politics reign, where Kavanaugh gained power and prestige — and where next week, she will return to relive it all again.
Like many affluent families in the area, the Blaseys sent their children to single-gender private schools. For Ford, that meant six years at Holton-Arms. Her classmates included the daughters of the King of Jordan and members of the J.W. Marriott clan.
Every summer, the “Holton girls” would pack into a rented house for Beach Week, an annual bacchanal of high-schoolers from around the region. The prep schools that formed Ford’s overlapping social circles usually gathered at a Delaware beach town each year. Kavanaugh, in his senior-year yearbook, cited his own membership in the “Beach Week Ralph Club.”
Like Kavanaugh, Ford was part of that alcohol-fueled culture. But those unchaperoned parties, at beach rentals and Bethesda basements alike, frequently left the girls feeling embattled.
“The boys were pretty brutal,” said Andrea Evers, a close friend. “They would do what they could to get you drunk, and do whatever they would try to do to you.”
In her Post interview, Ford said a group of boys from Georgetown Prep was at one of the beer-drinking sessions in an unsupervised house near Columbia Country Club, possibly in the summer of 1982. One of them was Kavanaugh, whom she described as an acquaintance. At the time, she was 15, and he was 17.
Kavanaugh and his classmate Mark Judge had started drinking earlier than others, she said, and the two were “stumbling drunk” when they pushed her into a bedroom. She alleges that Kavanaugh lay on top of her, fumbling with her clothes and pressing his hand over her mouth to keep her from screaming. Only when Judge jumped on top of them was she able to run from the room and hide until she could flee the house, she said.
Her biggest fear afterward, she recalled 37 years later, was looking as if she had just been attacked. So she carried herself as if she wasn’t. Down the stairs. Out the door. Onto the rest of her high school years, she said. She told no one.
For college, her first chance to start over in a new place, she chose the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, five hours away.
“It was not easy for her,” said Dan Goldstein, one of her closest friends at the time. “She had gone to a very small girls school and now was at a giant state university.”
Years later, Ford would describe college as a time when she “derailed,” struggling with symptoms of trauma she did not yet understand.
She’d been a cheerleader in high school and joined a sorority, but the lifestyle was too much like the place from which she’d come. Despite the talent for math she had shown in high school, one college classmate recalled Ford failing a statistics class.
It was during Ford’s junior year when Goldstein gave her the advice that would change the course of her life.
“He said, ‘You’re really smart, and you’re just like totally (messed) up,’ ” Ford recalled. She remembers him saying, “‘What are you doing? … Everbody’s getting it together but you’re like not.’ It was kind of a harsh talk.”
If she was going to graduate on time, he said, she ought to major in psychology.
That was how Christine Blasey Ford came to spend her life researching trauma and if it is possible to get past it.
Ford did graduate on time, then made a transformative jump to the other side of the country. Her high Graduate Record Examinations scores got her into a clinical psychology program at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif. A doctoral program at the University of Southern California followed. By then, Ford had learned to surf and wholly embraced the So-Cal lifestyle.
When she moved to Hawaii for a one-year internship to complete her PhD — taking a cheap studio apartment within boardcarrying distance of Sans Souci Beach — the conversion seemed complete.
“I think she had really reinvented herself,” said Jeff Harris, her supervisor at the University of Hawaii counseling center. “A surfer from California is a different image than a prep-school girl from Bethesda.”
She married Russell in 2002 and had two children. The family moved to the Palo Alto area in 2005.
Ford decided to enroll in another master’s program at Stanford, specializing in epidemiology. Her master’s thesis explored the relationship between trauma and depression.
She took a particular interest in resilience and post-traumatic growth — the ideas that people who endure trauma can return to normal and even wind up stronger than before. Ford said she has given speeches about this topic to students, telling them, “You can always recover.”
She’ll need to remember those lessons when she testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Ford knows what to expect: a hi-def repeat of the Anita HillClarence Thomas hearings. Three surviving members of the Senate Judiciary Committee during that 1991 confrontation will be on the dais — but this time the spectacle will unfold in the age of social media. She will likely be asked to detail every moment of the alleged attack. How much she had to drink. Why she went upstairs. What she was wearing.
She will be back in the city she left behind, facing the skepticism and exposure she has tried to avoid since the moment she fled that teenage party.