More than half a decade after Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh became the second of three Supreme Court justices appointed by former President Donald Trump, Christine Blasey Ford has reemerged from the wilderness of #Resistance-era one-hit wonders.
Ford, as you may recall, became the cause celebre when she alleged that on an unspecified date in an unspecified Bethesda, Maryland, house, Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were both teenagers. Now, just in time for the 2024 election, Ford is out with a new memoir that adds nothing of substance to back up her famously unverified allegation.
“All I can guess is that if he’d come to me, really leveled with me, and said, ‘I don’t remember this happening, but it might have, and I’m so sorry,’ it might have been a significant, therapeutic moment for survivors in general,” Ford writes in an excerpt published by the Guardian. “I might’ve wobbled a bit. I might have thought, ‘You know what, he was a jackass in high school but now he’s not.’ But when my story came out and he flat-out denied any possibility of every single thing I said, it did alleviate a little of my guilt. For me, the question of whether he had changed was answered. Any misgivings about him being a good person went away.”
But Kavanaugh was not on trial for being a “good person.” He was, thanks to Ford, in a de facto trial over whether or not he seized her one 1983 night at an unnamed party, locked her in a bedroom, threw her on a bed, and assaulted her. And five years after the trial, every witness named by Ford has denied her allegation.
The friend of Kavanaugh’s who Ford alleged was in the room of the supposed assault, Mark Judge, has repeatedly and vociferously denied any such event ever occurred. The only other girl Ford says was at this supposed party, Ford’s friend Leland Keyser, said she did not “have any confidence in the story.”
“It would be impossible for me to be the only girl at a get-together with three guys, have her leave, and then not figure out how she’s getting home,” said Keyser, who is a Democrat. “Those facts together I don’t recollect, and it just didn’t make any sense.”
P.J. Smyth, a classmate of Kavanaugh’s who Ford said was at this supposed party, also denied recalling such a party. Not only does nobody corroborate such a party ever actually happening, but nobody corroborates that Ford told them even the broadest outlines of her assault allegation at the time. It was only in 2012 that Ford detailed an assault allegation to her therapist, and even then, the therapist’s notes do not name Kavanaugh, who was making headlines at the time as a finalist on then-Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s Supreme Court short list.
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And still, the glaring lack of evidence to back Ford’s claim seems to have cost her many of her own familial ties. A glowing New York Times review of her memoir lauds Ford for being “incredibly forgiving of her old-school Republican father, who seems to value propriety — including, ouch, cordially emailing Kavanaugh’s dad after the confirmation — over defending his daughter’s experience,” noting that “her older brothers haven’t been much in touch since this all happened.”
There’s no inculpatory evidence that Ford was deliberately lying, but most people don’t get rewards ranging from dinners with Laurene Powell Jobs to sleepovers with Oprah in exchange for their stories. The question is whether this trade-off between Ford’s previous private life and her elevation to Resistance hero was a worthwhile one, not just for our own republic, fraying at the seams of the culture war, but for herself.
