Kavanaugh’s sex-assault accuser comes forward
Says she feared for her life during attack in high school
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 51-year-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 fled from the house.
Ford described the attack in late July in a confidential letter to Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, who honored Ford’s request for confidentiality but referred the matter to FBI. The bureau added it to Kavanaugh’s background investigation file but is not pursuing a criminal investigation.
The Post said Ford also had contacted the paper through a tip line in early June when it had become clear that Kavanaugh was on the short list for the Supreme Court nomination.
Ford said she never told anyone about the attack until 2012, when she was in couples therapy with her husband.
Ford’s husband, Russell Ford, told the Post that in their 2012 therapy sessions, she recounted the attack, used Kavanaugh’s last name and voiced concern that he might one day be nominated to the Supreme Court.
Ford also took a polygraph test, administered by a former FBI agent, on the advice of her attorney in early August, the paper said. The test concluded she was being truthful when she said a statement summarizing her allegations was accurate.
Ford said she does not remember some key details of the incident but believes it occurred in the summer of 1982, when she was 15, around the end of her sophomore year at the all-girls Holton-Arms School in Bethesda. Kavanaugh would have been 17 at the end of his junior year at Georgetown Prep.
The Post said that when it sought comment Sunday, the White House forwarded a statement Kavanaugh issued last week: “I categorically and unequivocally deny this allegation. I did not do this back in high school or at any time.”
The judge also has denied in newspaper interviews that the incident occurred.