Why Ford’s story resonated with me

I blamed myself for a 1980s sexual assault

When I was 15 years old, I passed out at a party after being fed all sorts of alcoholic concoctions by older boys I knew and idolized, but who in hindsight were eager to get me drunk.

I awoke with a popular senior basketball player on top of me and my shirt off. Dizzy and confused, I could barely remember anything. I asked what had happened and the boy told me we had just snuggled, but he couldn’t explain why my shirt was off.

A few days later, a male classmate I was close to exited the boys locker room visibly shaken. He told me this boy had bragged in the locker room that he had molested me when I was passed out. (That’s my word. The boy gleefully described in salacious detail what he did to me while I was unconscious.)

My face burned with shame. I begged my friend not to tell anyone else, and as far as I know he didn’t. I feared that if more people in my small Jesuit high school found out, I would be viewed as a “slut” or “damaged goods.”

The only people I would have trusted with this information were my parents, but to tell them would involve explaining why I was at a party drinking rather than at the sleepover I had permission to attend. I would have been grounded for eternity. I told no one.

I don’t know what month it was. I don’t know whose house it was. I remember one of my two best friends being there but she doesn’t remember it, and why would she? It was just a random party as far as she knew back then.

I can hear the doubters: Why didn’t you tell? Why didn’t you report him? Liar.

The answer is simple: I didn’t think I had been sexually assaulted. In the early 1980s, we didn’t have the vocabulary to make such declarations. I thought I did something stupid and paid a price. I thought it was my fault.

This memory came flooding back last week with Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against Brett Kavanaugh. Many have focused on the fact that she didn’t mention the event to anyone until 2012. As a former teenage girl in the early 1980s, this does not seem remarkable. In fact, the first time I spoke of the incident chronicled here was last week. Yet I have zero doubt of what happened and who did it to me.

When I was in high school, the phrase “sexual assault” was reserved for incidents of women being grabbed in dark alleys by strangers. It was always violent. If it wasn’t, then it wasn’t sexual assault. It wasn’t something done by a popular boy at school.

Lance Morrow of the Ethics & Public Policy Center channeled the 1980s view in The Wall Street Journal: “No clothes were removed, and no sexual penetration occurred. The sin, if there was one, was not one of those … that cry to heaven for vengeance.”

He didn’t rape you for God’s sake. Get over it. You don’t want to ruin a promising young man’s life, do you?

The same boy who molested me had forced one of my best friends to give him oral sex the year before while they were on a date. We were disgusted by him. We thought he was a creep. But the phrase “sexual assault” never came up.

If the person who sexually assaulted me and my friend turned into an outstanding citizen, good father and husband, do I think he should be put on the Supreme Court? No, I don’t.

As a Christian I believe in forgiveness and redemption. However, we cannot send teenage boys the message that they can sexually assault someone and, as long as they become good citizens, we will elevate them to one of the most important positions in our society. We cannot send the message to teenage girls that attacks on their bodies don’t matter because the perpetrator is young like them, or that their response is what will be put on trial.

The fact that my friend and I continued to go to parties where this boy was, or said hello to him in the hallway, does not mean these things did not happen. Our behavior then is not the problem. Ford’s failure to talk to anyone about what happened to her for decades is not the problem. The problem is that the culture did not give us the language to describe such violations, and made us feel that talking to an authority figure would make things worse.

Fortunately for women, what happened in the 1980s isn’t staying in the 1980s. It’s a reckoning that is overdue.