On Monday night, the Senate Judiciary Committee announced that Christine Blasey Ford would have the opportunity to testify at a public hearing next Monday about her accusation that Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when the two were high-school students, and Kavanaugh will have a chance to respond.
But the senators weighing the claims can’t seem to articulate any objective standards or a burden of proof that must be met. Arizona Republican senator Jeff Flake said he would vote against Kavanaugh if he concludes the allegation is true. But he didn’t provide any specifics about how he would assess the veracity of the claim of assault from 1982, which Ford did not mention to anyone until 2012.
“It’s very difficult,” Flake said, when asked about how he would evaluate the claim. “It’s the process we have,” he said of public hearings. “What I just insisted on is that we not have a vote. I would have voted ‘no’ this week, absent her being able to tell her story. So I’m glad she’s going to be able to. I may conclude afterwards that you know he should go on and fill that seat. I may not.”
Democratic senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, who has already decided to vote against Kavanaugh, said that “elements of the charge” have “validation and corroboration,” specifically citing the fact that Ford had told a therapist about an assault in 2012 (though Kavanaugh is not mentioned by name in the therapist’s notes) and that the alleged accomplice in the assault, Mark Judge, has “written a book about how he went through high school blackout drinking.”
When I asked Kaine if there was anything a truly innocent person could do to prove his innocence here, Kaine replied: “That’s kind of very hypothetical.”
When Democratic senator and Judiciary Committee member Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut was asked how he would evaluate the accusation, he seemed to have already made his mind up. “I believe the survivor,” Blumenthal said. “This woman has demonstrated that she’s willing to endure a nightmare of intense and hostile scrutiny.”
But Blumenthal couldn’t say how an innocent person could clear his name in these circumstances:
Blumenthal: You know, this nominee is for the highest court in the land. And a lifetime appointment. There’s no margin of error here.
TWS: So there’s no way to prove your innocence here?
Blumenthal: We need to do the full fact-finding, and I’m not speculating on what the standard should be. But we need to know the facts.
TWS: So you don’t know how an innocent person could prove his innocence in this situation? I mean, if it was yourself and a 35-year-old accusation from one person, how would you prove your innocence here?
Blumenthal: The investigation has to talk to the witnesses who were there at the time, has to include all records and other evidence. That’s the way cases are done. That’s the way cases are proven.
From Harvey Weinstein to Roy Moore to Les Moonves, the #MeToo movement has been successful in meting out justice in the court of public opinion because many of the cases involved multiple women providing testimony of wrongdoing, and contemporaneous accounts of assaults that had been given to friends and family who similarly went on the record. In the case of Ford v. Kavanaugh, Democratic senators now seem ready to embrace the principle that a single accusation that wasn’t told to anyone until the accused was a prominent public figure 30 years later is enough to destroy the reputation and career of the accused. The real question now is if, lacking corroboration of the assault allegation, any Republicans will join them in embracing this new standard for Supreme Court nominees and public officials everywhere.
