Intense, emotional testimony reflects high political stakes
She said. He said. To different audiences. In different tones. With different goals. What Christine Blasey Ford said she remembers most vividly is “the uproarious laughter” of two teenage boys when they shoved her into a bedroom at a party 36 years ago and one tried to rape her. Her voice quavered Thursday, she was deferential to senators, but she was “100 percent” certain — her would-be rapist was Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh was angry and he was loud when he insisted to the Senate Judiciary Committee that Ford was mistaken and that Democrats were engaged in a “calculated and orchestrated political hit.” In a remarkable warning from a prospective Supreme Court justice, he said,
“What goes around comes around.”
Ford’s certainty, and that wrenching detail about the incident, is likely to reverberate for years with sexual-assault survivors and many women. But Kavanaugh was playing to a much smaller audience in the near term — the 51 Republican senators whose votes he will need to be confirmed, and President Trump.
The emotions at the hearing reflected the high stakes: If the 53-year-old Kavanaugh is confirmed, he could tilt the court to the right for a generation.
“He came across very angry, and she came across very shaken by the events,” said Kelly Dittmar, a scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics and a political science professor at Rutgers University. “He could easily have been shaken, too, but it came across as anger.
“It reminds us that an expression of anger and sense of ‘I’ve been wronged’ is much more permitted in men than women,” Dittmar said.
Kavanaugh’s anger appeared to be just as genuine as Ford’s nervousness — the Palo Alto University psychology professor told members of the committee that she was “terrified.” But Kavanaugh’s tone was also calculated — on Wednesday, he had released a text of his opening statement that contained none of the fury that he unleashed on Democrats over 45 minutes on Thursday. He wrote the new version himself, he said.
It was by turns defiant, angry and melancholy, as the nominee lashed out at the committee’s 10 Democrats for a “confirmation process that has become a national disgrace.”
In earlier confirmation hearings, Kavanaugh portrayed himself as someone who would be a neutral arbiter on the Supreme Court, immune to political pressure. That persona vanished Thursday as he blamed a conspiracy of “the left,” including those who sought “revenge on behalf of the Clintons” for his involvement in the brutally partisan Kenneth Starr investigation into President Bill Clinton’s extramarital affairs two decades ago.
“Your coordinated and wellfunded effort to try to destroy my family will not drive me out,” Kavanaugh said. “You may defeat me in the final vote, but you’ll never get me to quit. Never.”
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina picked up the angry tone in the seventh hour of the hearing, after the all-male GOP majority had given the job of questioning Ford to a female sex-crimes prosecutor who stuck mostly to plodding, procedural matters.
“This is not a job interview. This is hell,” Graham said. Pointing to the Democrats on the panel, he roared, “What you want to do is destroy this guy’s life, hold this seat open, and hope you win in 2020.”
Kavanaugh might have been “more emotional and more aggressive” because of criticism among conservatives that he was too passive during a Fox
“He came across very angry, and she came across very shaken by the events.” Kelly Dittmar, Rutgers University political science professor
News interview this week, said Lorraine Bayard de Volo, a professor of women and gender studies at the University of Colorado. “Perhaps he was responding to that criticism by acting that way to the audience of 51 people he was addressing.”
Trump — who has the power to yank Kavanaugh’s nomination — loved the combative tone. He tweeted moments after the hearing ended that “Judge Kavanaugh showed America exactly why I nominated him. His testimony was powerful, honest, and riveting. Democrats’ search and destroy strategy is disgraceful and this process has been a total sham and effort to delay, obstruct, and resist. The Senate must vote!”
Kavanaugh’s testimony was a jarring shift from the first half of the hearing, when Ford softly told senators about the decades of trauma she has endured.
“Indelible is the laughter,” Ford said when she was asked what she remembered most about the attack she says was perpetrated by Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge. “The uproarious laughter between the two. And the fun that they were having at my expense.”
That trauma contributed to long-term problems, she testified. Ford recounted her “disastrous” first few years of college, where she had a hard time focusing on her studies. She talked about the anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder that she suffered for years afterward. She talked about insisting that she and her husband build a second front door on their Palo Alto home. It was a nod to the claustrophobia she says has afflicted her, a remnant of the memory of Kavanaugh allegedly putting his hand over her mouth as she tried to scream for help.
“It resonates with women and survivors everywhere,” said Rachel Carmona, chief operating officer of the Women’s March. That includes Carmona, who says she was assaulted when she was 8 years old but didn’t tell anyone until she was 15.
“That was half my life,” Carmona said. “The fact that she came forward decades later to
fulfill her duty to protect democracy — that’s a very powerful thing.”
Speaking with a voice filled with emotion, Ford told the committee that “I am here today not because I want to be. I am terrified. I am here because I believe it is my civic duty to tell you what happened to me while Brett Kavanaugh and me were in high school.”
It echoed what Anita Hill told the same committee 27 years ago when she testified about being sexually harassed by high court nominee Clarence Thomas when they both worked at a federal agency. “It is only after a great deal of agonizing consideration and sleepless nights that I am able to talk of these unpleasant matters to anyone but my close friends,” Hill told the committee.
The backlash to how senators on the then-all-male panel dismissed Hill’s testimony led to the 1992 Year of the Woman, when a record number of women were elected to higher office. Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, who was swept into office during that wave and is now the ranking Democrat on the committee, said Thursday that “there has been a great deal of public discussion about the #MeToo movement today versus the “Year of the Woman” almost 27 years ago . ... But while young women are standing up and saying ‘No more,’ our institutions have not progressed in how they treat women who come forward.”
If Hill’s hearing opened America’s eyes to sexual harassment, some hoped that Ford’s testimony could help others understand why sexualassault survivors often carry their trauma with them for years.
“Christine Blasey Ford has done a huge consciousnessraising service” said de Volo, the Colorado professor. “That’s my generation, and we kind of tucked those kinds of incidents away. At that time, many of us wouldn’t be naming it sexual assault. We’d say, ‘Oh, that’s Brett. He’s crazy. Don’t get around him when he drinks.’ But we’re living in a different moment now.”
But “Brett” says that wasn’t him. Unlike Ford, the quiet approach wasn’t working for him. If he wins confirmation, it will be because he chose sides in Washington’s partisan war.