JUDGE & ACCUSER MIGHT BOTH BE HONEST
IBELIEVE something happened to Christine Blasey Ford more than three decades ago. Six years before Brett Kavanaugh was a nominee for the Supreme Court, Ford related the story of an encounter with him to her therapist, which would have required an implausible prescience if her sexual-assault allegation is, as I’ve seen some conservatives argue, all part of an elaborate scheme.
And yet, I believe Kavanaugh may also be sincere when he denies the incident. Which is to say that both he and Ford may think they’re telling the truth. How those individual truths bear on actual events is a more complicated question. We may never know the answer.
It’s a cliché that memory is fallible, but in recent years, thanks to researchers such as Elizabeth Loftus, just how fallible it is has become clear. People can sincerely forget things you’d think they would remember, or they remember details or even whole events they couldn’t possibly have experienced.
It is probable that at least some of the details of Ford’s story are wrong, even if the bones are quite true — and horrifying. And it’s equally possible Kavanaugh doesn’t remember it, either because she has misidentified him, or because he was blackout drunk, or because he saw the same events as more benign than Ford did, and his mind saw no reason to file that memory away.
We’d like to think we could detect who’s lying in a hearing by watching Kavanaugh and Ford testify. Only at this point, it seems possible that neither will be deliberately lying — and that no one else will be able to corroborate or disprove such a vague story.
Contra conservatives, the vagueness of Ford’s story isn’t proof that it didn’t happen. But the lack of detail does make it essentially impossible for Kavanaugh to defend himself. “Prove you weren’t at a house party somewhere in Montgomery County between the years 1979 and 1982” would set a new high for nomination standards.
One way out of the dilemma is to say that whatever happened that night, a Supreme Court nomination shouldn’t be derailed by a teenage boy’s behavior some 35 years ago. This argument has real merit, not because sexual assault is all right if you’re 17, but because people do change, and a decent society recognizes that.
In the case of minors, whose brains aren’t fully formed, I especially believe in radical forgiveness and redemption. If you truly believe, as I do, that no one’s character should be summed up by the worst thing they ever did, then people who have atoned and lived honorably for decades should be readmitted to society in full good standing — including admission to the highest court of the land.
But my views on criminal justice are a micro-minority position, and the democratic legitimacy of this appointment matters. Installing Kavanaugh with the allegations unresolved would further corrode an already tattered civic fabric.
Unfortunately, with the midterms almost upon us, there’s no path to an outcome that both sides see as legitimate. Democrats can insist that the revelation of Ford’s story was not exquisitely timed to exactly the moment when it became impossible to confirm a different nominee before the elections. But they are in essentially the same position as Kavanaugh: Even if they are telling the truth, they have no way to provide convincing proof.
Which leaves us, at this point, with only one clear truth. Absent a lightning bolt from the evidence gods, America is going to be stuck with partial and unsatisfying answers to unresolvable questions.