Kavanaugh, Ford ready for today’s testimony
WASHINGTON — California professor Christine Blasey Ford plans to tell senators Thursday that she is “no one’s pawn” and that an alleged 1982 sexual assault by now-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh has “been seared into my memory and ... haunted me episodically as an adult.”
In her opening statement for the high-stakes hearing, released Wednesday, Ford said a drunken Kavanaugh, then 17, pinned her to a bed at a party, groping her, trying to remove her clothes and placing his hand over her mouth when she tried to yell for help.
“This was what terrified me the most, and has had the most lasting impact on my life,” she said. “I thought that Brett was accidentally going to kill me.”
Ford’s dramatic testimony came as a third woman, Julie Swetnick, 55, accused Kavanaugh of being present at another 1982 party at which she alleges she was gang raped, according to a statement released by attorney Michael Avenatti.
Swetnick did not accuse Kavanaugh of participating in the assault, but described drunken, aggressive behavior by Kavanaugh and his high school friend, Mark Judge.
Both Kavanaugh and Judge have denied all of the allegations against them.
As the potentially pivotal moment in the nomination fight approached, President Donald Trump weighed in as well, saying for the first time publicly that accusations of sexual misconduct against him — from more than a dozen women — have colored his perception of the Kavanaugh allegations.
“It does impact my opinion. You know why? Because I’ve had a lot of false charges made against me,” Trump said at a news conference in New York.
“I know friends that have had false charges. People want fame. They want money. They want whatever. So when I see it, I view it differently than somebody sitting home watching television.”
In the sometimes rambling, 80-minute session with reporters — only the third full-scale news conference of his presidency — Trump denounced The New York Times as “fake,” said Democrats would oppose George Washington if he were before them, and quoted Elton John’s advice about how to end a performance: “When you hit that last tune and it’s good, don’t go back.”
He insisted he would watch the hearing with an open mind, adding at one point that if the testimony convinced him that Kavanaugh was guilty, he would withdraw the nomination.
But he repeatedly portrayed the women’s allegations as part of a “big, fat con job” orchestrated by Democrats, who, he said, “laugh like hell on what they pulled off on you and on the public.” And he praised Kavanaugh as a “great intellect, a brilliant man.”
Earlier in the day, at the United Nations, Trump said he wished the confirmation process had moved more quickly.
“They could have pushed it through 2 { weeks ago and you wouldn’t be talking about it right now, which is frankly what I would have preferred,” Trump said. “But they didn’t do that.”
In his own opening statement, released Wednesday by the Senate Judiciary Committee, Kavanaugh plans to tell senators that he is the victim of a “grotesque and obvious character assassination.”
Previously Kavanaugh has denied the allegations, but expressed empathy with Ford. His statement, however, took a harder line.
“There has been a frenzy to come up with something — anything, no matter how farfetched or odious — that will block a vote on my nomination,” Kavanaugh plans to say. “These are last-minute smears, pure and simple. They debase our public discourse.”
His comments are reminiscent of the response by then nominee Clarence Thomas in 1991, who forcefully dismissed Anita Hill’s claims of sexual harassment as a “high-tech lynching.”
The committee also released transcripts of interviews with its staff. In one, Kavanaugh told the committee that he never drank to excess to the point of blacking out. That interview, on Sept. 17, came shortly after the Ford allegations were published in The Washington Post.
“I drank beer and (the amount) would depend on the time of year, whether we were in football season, things like that,” Kavanaugh said. He also said that while in high school he attended unsupervised parties where alcohol was present.
Kavanaugh appeared more frustrated when committee staff followed up a week later, asking him about a second allegation, which was made by Deborah Ramirez. She said a drunken Kavanaugh exposed himself to her when both were drunk at Yale University.
He called the claim an “outrageous,” “thin, uncorroborated, 35-year-old accusation.”