From anonymity to Supreme Court fight
Kavanaugh accuser steps forward into controversy, threats
The text message from Christine Blasey Ford this summer worried her college best friend, Catherine Piwowarski.
Over their years of friendship — as roommates, bridesmaids and parents on opposite coasts — Ford wanted to know, had she ever confided that she had been sexually assaulted in high school?
No, Piwowarski said she texted back, she would have remembered that, and was everything OK? Ford didn’t want to speak in detail quite yet, her friend recalled her responding. “I don’t know why she was asking that or what it ultimately meant or didn’t mean,” Piwowarski said in an interview, but she remembers thinking that the question betrayed deep turmoil.
That was about a month before Ford, a research psychologist, came forward with her allegation that Judge Brett Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, sexually assaulted her more than three decades ago when they were high school students in the Washington suburbs.
Similar to Anita Hill case
Just days ago, both Ford and Kavanaugh had been expected to testify on Monday before the Senate Judiciary Committee about her allegation, setting up a contest of credibility reminiscent of 1991, when Anita Hill leveled accusations of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas, then a Supreme Court nominee. But it is increasingly uncertain whether that will happen. Ford’s lawyers on Tuesday called for an FBI investigation of her allegation before she testifies, but the Senate Republican leadership has rejected the idea and said that a vote on the Kavanaugh nomination will go forward if she does not appear.
Ford’s allegation has divided not just the Senate and the country but also the overlapping social circles of the judge and the researcher, as former classmates, colleagues, friends and others have written warring letters of support in recent days. Ford’s lawyers, Debra Katz and Lisa Banks, say that since she went public with her story last weekend, she has been subjected to death threats, had her email hacked and had to leave her home. Speculation has arisen in the capital that Ford, who had already been reluctant to come forward, ultimately may decline to testify, at least publicly.
Supporters of Ford, 51, describe her as a precise, logical scientific thinker; a community leader; a woman of integrity; and a devoted mother of two boys.
“Her life’s work is about telling the truth with science,” said Kate Beebe DeVarney, a behavioral neuroscientist who has worked with Ford in Silicon Valley. “Christine doesn’t get stuff wrong. She’s obsessive about making sure it’s right,” she added. “If Christine says something happened, I absolutely believe her.”
Backers of Kavanaugh, 53, describe him as a precise, methodical legal thinker; a strong mentor; a pillar of the community where he and Ford grew up; and a devoted father of two girls. Trump this week praised the judge as an “outstanding intellect,” who “never had even a little blemish on his record.”
Kavanaugh, a Republican, is a staunch Catholic conservative who lives in the nation’s capital. Ford, colleagues say, is a Democrat from California who wore a pink “brain hat” when she joined fellow academics in protesting the Trump administration’s proposed cuts to scientific research funding. Their histories coalesced, in Ford’s telling, in the early 1980s, in the insular, moneyed world of Washington private college preparatory schools.
She began attending HoltonArms School, a private girls’ prep school in Bethesda, Md., in seventh grade, joining a tight-knit group of about 65 girls. High school friends and classmates described “Chrissy,” as Ford was known then, as a popular girl equally comfortable in math class and at social gatherings.
Samantha Semerad Guerry said Ford fit right in. Athletic and outdoorsy, she joined the soccer, softball and cheerleading teams.
“She was universally well-liked — always cheerful, affable, funny, and super smart,” Guerry said.
“She was self-possessed,” recalls Cheryl Aviva Amitay, who graduated in 1985, the year after Ford.
Rowdy party schools
Drinking was commonplace among the private school teenagers, and the laws governing alcohol and minors were more lax than now.
“Back then, pretty much there were parties every Friday and Saturday night, somewhere,” said Samu Qureshi, a friend of Ford’s who attended Landon, the brother school to Holton Arms, two years ahead of her. “Generally, parents are out and the kids are getting a keg.”
Holton-Arms’ yearbook includes pages of photographs of girls with drinks. Boys would be invited from the surrounding schools — Landon, Georgetown Prep, and St. Albans — for dances. Things could get rowdy, especially at unsupervised parties before and after school functions, students from that era recalled.
A yearbook entry for Kavanaugh, a varsity football and basketball player at Georgetown Prep, described him as “Keg City Club (Treasurer) — 100 Kegs or Bust.” Mark Judge, a classmate and close friend, describes his own blackout drinking during those years in “Wasted: Tales of a Gen X Drunk,” his 1997 memoir about his experiences as a teenage alcoholic. The book mentions a person named “Bart O’Kavanaugh” who had “puked in someone’s car” and “passed out on his way back from a party.” Judge did not respond to queries this week about whether that name refers to Kavanaugh.
This was the environment in which Ford, when she was about 15 years old, encountered Kavanaugh at a gathering at another teen’s house in Montgomery County, Maryland, she said. She knew him before the alleged incident, she has said, countering a theory of mistaken identity advanced by Kavanaugh and his supporters in the Senate.
She had met him a couple of times, though they didn’t run in the same circles, a person close to Ford said.
According to a letter sent to Sen. Dianne Feinstein in July, Ford claimed that Kavanaugh pushed her into a bedroom as she headed upstairs to a bathroom. He and someone she described as a “very drunken” friend — identified in later news reports as Judge — locked the door and played loud music, she wrote. Kavanaugh then pushed her on a bed, began grinding his body against hers and tried to undress her, she said. To stifle her screams, she asserted, he covered her mouth with his hand.
Judge, Ford alleged, told his friend to alternately “go for it” and “stop.”
When Judge jumped on the bed, causing the three teenagers to tumble onto the floor, Ford said she ran from the room and locked herself in a bathroom. She later escaped.
Ford said she did not share a detailed account of the incident with anyone until 2012, when she and her husband, Russell Ford, an engineer, met with a couples therapist, according to a Washington Post interview. In her letter to Feinstein, she described being traumatized from the high school episode, saying “I have received medical treatment regarding the assault.” She declined to be interviewed for this article.
Private education circles
Judge, now an author, filmmaker and writer for conservative publications, wrote in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee that he had no memory of the incident.
Ford’s allegation has ignited controversy in Washington’s private school circles, reflecting the same social divisions — by gender, alma mater, class and religion — that had riven alumni as teenagers more than three decades ago. Some Georgetown Prep classmates have cast aspersions on Ford on social media, while her allies charge hypocrisy in their overlooking a pervasive culture of misogyny that existed then.
Twenty-three members of Ford’s class at Holton-Arms signed a joint letter sent to Congress this week, calling for “due consideration” of her claims. Another letter is signed by more than 1,000 alumnae, dating back to the class of 1948.
After the alleged attack on Ford, a male friend said, she “fell off the face of the earth socially,” failing to appear at parties and events she’d previously attended. “All I remember is after my junior year thinking, ‘Where’s Chrissy Blasey?’” he recalled.
“She was the sort of person a lot of people paid attention to — she was a leader, she was great. I was like, where did she go?”