Kavanaugh accuser emerges

She feared for her life during attack, she says

WASHINGTON – The woman who wrote a confidential letter accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when they were in high school says she feared for her life during the attack.

“I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” Christine Blasey Ford, now a 51year-old research psychologist in Northern California, told The Washington Post in an interview published Sunday. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.”

The Post interview marks the first time Ford has allowed her name to be disclosed since her accusations against Kavanaugh became public last week. Kavanaugh has denied the allegations.

The paper said Ford is a professor at Palo Alto University who teaches in a consortium with Stanford University, training graduate students in clinical psychology. Her work has been widely published in academic journals.

Ford said she decided to come forward and tell her story after a barebones version of the events became public without her name or consent, prompting a denial from Kavanaugh and throwing his nomination into turmoil.

According to Ford, the attack occurred one summer during the early 1980s when she and Kavanaugh attended a gathering with other teenagers at a house in Montgomery County, Maryland. Ford contends that Kavanaugh and a friend, both of whom she described as “stumbling drunk,” corralled her into a bedroom.

While his friend watched, Ford said, Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed on her back and groped her over her clothes. Kavanaugh grinded his body against hers and attempted to pull off her onepiece bathing suit and the clothing she wore over it, she said. When she tried to scream, she said, he put his hand over her mouth.

Ford said she escaped when Kavanaugh’s friend and classmate at Georgetown Preparatory School, Mark Judge, jumped on top of all of them, sending all three tumbling. She said she ran from the room, briefly locked herself in a bathroom and then left.