Nearly a month after Christine Blasey Ford’s historic testimony against now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Yale alumnus, the event is still the impetus for conflict at the Ivy League campus. This ongoing climate now includes acts of vandalism.
Last Monday, Yale students arrived to find quotations from Ford’s testimony spray-painted in several prominent locations around campus, including the steps of the main entrance of Yale Law School, from which Kavanaugh graduated in 1990. Photos show the entrance graffitied with the phrase “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” a quote from Ford’s testimony referring to the alleged laughter shared between Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge as Kavanaugh was allegedly sexually assaulting her.
Grafitti was also found on the doors of first-year student housing building Lawrance Hall, which read, “I have had to relive my trauma in front of the entire world.”
The Yale School of Music building Sprague Hall was adorned with the quote, “I thought that Brett was accidentally going to kill me.”
In addition to the graffiti, posters were also plastered around campus that read, “Yale is complicit.” The Yale Daily News reports that while the quotes have been removed, the posters remain up on bulletin boards.
“We’re not aware of when this happened, but the university police were notified,” Yale Director of External Communications Karen Peart told The Yale Daily News, adding that “[a]ny graffiti will be removed because the university’s free expression policies do not permit the defacement of university property.”
One resident of the defaced housing building, Reilly Johnson, told the Yale Daily News that she was not bothered by the defacement of the building. “I think it’s more important that people are forced to notice, and, if what you have to do is spray paint because covering the bulletin boards isn’t enough — and clearly that’s not enough — then that’s what you’ve got to do,” she said.
Celine Ryan (@celinedryan) is a journalism student living on the central coast of California. She writes about politics, culture, and campus news.
