Palo Alto mayor’s #MeToo moment
‘If (Christine Blasey Ford) can do it, for gosh sakes, so can I’
She’s kept it secret for more than 50 years. She didn’t go to police. She never told her husband, not even her friends. The only person she confided in was her sister.
But standing in front of Christine Blasey Ford’s home in Palo Alto, where a rally of women chanting “Your story is our story!” was just breaking up, Palo Alto Mayor Liz Kniss decided right there, on the spot, it was time.
“If she can do it, for gosh sakes,” Kniss said, taking a breath, “so can I.”
With the TV cameras preoccupied and the last of the protesters heading down the block, she stood under the needles of an evergreen and, in a quiet moment, opened up about the most trau-
matizing events in her life.
As a young woman in her late teens and early 20s, Kniss said, she, too, was the victim of what “would certainly be called sexual assaults.” One was a childhood friend who offered to drive her home from a party, “took a shortcut” into the woods, groped her and tried to climb on top of her. The other was a pilot who pushed her onto a bed in a hotel room where a flight crew party had just broken up, pinned her down and pulled at her clothes. Both times she somehow managed to push back and talk her way out. Both times she believes she barely escaped being raped. Both times she dared not say a word.
What happened to her, Kniss said, “is just what happened” to Blasey Ford, who has accused U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of pinning her down, groping her and trying to pull off her clothes when they were teenagers at a house party more than 30 years ago — charges Kavanaugh vigorously denies.
“It was probably the most frightening thing that can happen to anyone,” Kniss said. “It lives with you your entire life.”
Kniss is in her 70s now, and it took this moment, this place, for her to unload the burden of five decades of silence.
Suddenly, the emptiness of this one-story house with the basketball pole out front in the Palo Alto neighborhood of Eichler-style homes has become a powerful symbol in a nation struggling to reshape the power imbalance between men and women, with the future of the U.S. Supreme Court, no less, at stake. The fact that Blasey Ford — a college professor and research psychologist — went into hiding with her family to escape death threats has triggered deeply held emotions in women who say they are infuriated once more by the treatment of those with the courage to come forward.
Kniss didn’t intend to tell her own story, no matter that she is a confident, accomplished woman, an advocate for domestic violence victims, a retired nurse and a one-time flight attendant, former president of the Santa Clara County board of supervisors and now mayor in the cradle of Silicon Valley. Over the course of her career, she has stood up to political attacks and insults — and even death threats over a heated land dispute.
But if she were to break her silence about the sexual assaults from decades ago, she feared what other women fear: blame and shame.
“I’ve done politics a long time. Not that you develop such a thick skin, but you know the kind of response you’ll get. Some people will say, ‘You know, she must have put herself in that situation,’ ” Kniss said. “You feel so vulnerable after it, because you also think people will question the veracity of it, just like they’re doing with Dr. Ford.”
Kniss has had opportunities to share her story before: At the height of the #MeToo movement last year, she was having coffee with friends when one of them told her own story, saying, “I was scared to death. I was glad to get out alive.” Still, Kniss said nothing.
While talking to TV reporters Thursday about whether Blasey Ford should testify before the nation and the Senate Judiciary Committee, Kniss would only speak in generalities, about how difficult it is for victims to tell their stories.
“In order to really move forward with this,” Kniss told the TV cameras, “we need some heroines and people who will really speak up.”
The cameras had just turned away when a Mercury News reporter approached with a notebook and asked: Had she ever experienced a #MeToo moment?
In front of this home — where Blasey Ford had insisted her husband include bedroom doors to the outside when they remodeled so that she wouldn’t feel trapped — Kniss said she felt suddenly emboldened and safe.
“Yes,” she blurted out. Did she care to talk about it, on the record?
She hesitated for a moment, then said, “You know what? Why not?”
Like Blasey Ford, who apparently doesn’t remember exactly where and when she was assaulted 35 years ago in suburban Washington, D.C., Kniss doesn’t remember exactly when the two assaults occurred or how far apart they were. Was she a nursing student at Simmons College in Massachusetts when the man she knew since first grade drove her home, or had she moved to California by then and was just back home at Cape Cod for a summer vacation? Was she 23 or 25 when the pilot attacked? They might have been on a layover in Newfoundland, she said, but she can’t remember which hotel.
Still, Kniss said, “I remember everything about both of them, totally.”
What she remembers, she said, is what matters.
That’s essentially what U.S. Rep. Anna Eshoo, a Palo Alto Democrat, told this news organization about her interview with Blasey Ford in July: “What she was sure of, she was positive about.”
Kniss is still embarrassed to go into sordid detail about what transpired with the childhood friend in the woods or the pilot in the hotel room. “It makes me feel flawed,” she said, but then thought that wasn’t quite the right word. Maybe “vulnerable” is better.
She remembers it was summer in the mid-1960s, and she was wearing Bermuda shorts and a jersey top on that detour onto a dark dirt road.
“The groping, the trying to get your clothes — I’m being much more frank than I normally would be,” she said. “You know what the guy really wants in the end, and that’s what you’re trying to fight off. It feels violent at the time.”
This was no stolen kiss,
she said, or some awkward indiscretion by an inexperienced young man who didn’t know what he was doing.
“I’d say it was horrendous to go through,” she said.
He tried to get on top of her — and he went “way too far,” she said. But “that’s enough of that,” she said. “That’s as far as I can go” with explaining the worst of what happened that night.
“I probably pushed my way out of it, and I certainly said things like ‘My parents know your parents, my friends know your friends,’ the kind of thing that is at least sobering.”
She didn’t tell anyone — and waited at least a year or more before telling her younger sister, Jayne, and swearing her to secrecy.
Reached at her home in Cotuit on Cape Cod, Jayne Hayden Uyenoyama said her sister gave her permission to speak. “I haven’t told a soul until today. I’ve taken it down to Egypt, as they say.”
She remembers the fear in her sister’s voice as she recounted the incident.
“At that age you’re embarrassed and you think maybe you provoked it, or maybe it was my fault, but it wasn’t,” Uyenoyama said. “She was certainly frightened by it, very frightened by it.”
Kniss, however, never told Uyenoyama about the pilot’s assault two or three years later.
As Kniss describes it, one minute her hotel room was filled with a jovial flight
crew and the next she was left alone with the pilot.
“There was nothing, nothing that would have tipped me off that he would have been a problem,” she said. In a moment, she was terrified.
“The pilot was violent,” she said. “He pushed me down on the bed. I was pinned down, no question.”
Again, she was reluctant to discuss some of the petrifying details, but she managed to talk and shove her way out of it again. She escaped somehow, she said, and ended up in the hotel lobby.
“There is that guilt and the fact that you feel like society will say ‘aha, it’s her fault,’ ” Kniss said. Even now, in telling her story more than 50 years later, she struggles with the same feelings and fears.
So yes, she can relate to Blasey Ford, a woman more than 20 years her junior whose critics are attacking her and shrugging off the alleged assault as teenage horseplay and too long ago to matter.
Kniss doesn’t know whatever became of the pilot. She knew his name back then but doesn’t remember it now.
And the boy from her hometown? She didn’t want his name published to spare his family. If he had been nominated for the Supreme Court or some office, that would be different, she said. She never saw him after that night in the woods. She moved to California and worked as a nurse for
“It was probably the most frightening thing that can happen to anyone. It lives with you your entire life.” — Palo Alto Mayor Liz Kniss
years, with a brief interlude as a flight attendant to travel the world.
But her sister would occasionally mention him, that he had married, that he was revered around town and, finally, several years ago, that he had died.
His obituary in the local paper called him a man with “a heart of gold,” who was “committed to building character” and “instilling good values” in the local youth.
“Good grief,” Uyenoyama said. “My sister would probably vomit reading that.”
When he died, Kniss said, part of her was sorry, “sorry he died before I had a chance to confront him.”
She doesn’t have panic attacks or nightmares. She doesn’t feel a primal need for escape routes. But for years she fantasized over and over about what she would say if she saw him on the streets of her hometown.
“I would have just expressed in very strong terminology — using words you don’t really publish — what he did and how upset I was about it,” she said.
Maybe that’s why she has been so hopeful that Blasey Ford will testify against Kavanaugh, as it appears she will sometime this week. There, she can confront him directly, whether there is an FBI investigation or not, whether she is grilled by hostile senators or not, and whether they listen to her or not.
“If she does, she will have made a gift to all women and given them strength,” Kniss said.
Now that she thinks about it, she said, “I wish it were me.”