The most important witness to Christine Blasey Ford’s assault allegation against Justice Brett Kavanaugh has always been her childhood friend, Leland Keyser. The only other girl at the 1982 (or thereabouts) party, Keyser previously maintained what every other supposed attendee named by Ford had said — she had no recollection of such a party ever happening.
But the new book, The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation, doesn’t just undermine the credibility of Ford’s allegation by quoting Keyser outright denying the plausibility of such an assault happening. It undermines Ford because the details revealed about the night of the party by Ford herself do not add up.
One of the questionable, but not disqualifying, aspects of Ford’s allegation was that the house party at the center of her story was some miles away from her family home. In an era without Lyft or Uber, and in a residential area likely without taxi cabs, a persistent question has been how Ford got to and from the party. Today, Ford thinks that Keyser drove her both ways.
“[Christine] suspects she ended up there because Ingham (Keyser) was in contact with [Mark] Judge, and that Ingham probably drove her there, since she already had her license and often gave Christine a ride,” New York Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly write in the book. “The house was located somewhere between the Columbia club and the Blasey home, in Potomac; Christine cannot remember a more specific location.”
After the alleged assault, during which she says Kavanaugh seized and mounted her on a bed while friend Mark Judge watched, Ford says she hid in the bathroom after escaping the locked bedroom. Then, Pogrebin and Kelly say that Ford “suspects that she grabbed Ingham, who probably drove her home. The details of that hasty departure are no longer clear.”
It’s theoretically possible that some 30 years later, you wouldn’t remember driving your friend home from a random high school party. But there are two confounding factors.
First, Keyser, who has always maintained having no recollection of a party with the named people or place, was dating Judge that summer. It seems highly unlikely that you couldn’t at least confirm that you attended a party with your good friend and boyfriend, especially seeing as how the house very likely belonged to Judge’s family. Second, if so many pivotal logistics of that night hinge on Keyser, then her assertion that she doesn’t have “any confidence in the story” is all the more damning.
The denials of the other boys at the party were never strongly exculpatory for Kavanaugh. For friends to protect one of their own in cases of assault would not be uncommon, and seeing as all the other named attendees of the party attended Georgetown Prep with Kavanaugh, one might expect that that they’d lie or willfully forget on his behalf.
But Keyser is Ford’s close personal friend, a Democratic partisan, and the person most likely to remember the sheer existence of such a party. That she outright denies it and doubts such a thing could even have happened creates a gaping inconsistency in Ford’s story.
