Brett Kavanaugh: ‘This Confirmation Process Has Become a National Disgrace’
Updated on September 27 at 6:47 p.m. ET
On Thursday, the American public got to put a face to the name, and a voice to the story, of Christine Blasey Ford. And hours later, the public saw an entirely new Brett Kavanaugh.
The California university professor brought her allegation of sexual assault against Kavanaugh to a U.S. Senate hearing room, telling members of the Judiciary Committee—and a national television audience—that President Donald Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court “groped me and tried to take off my clothes” while the two were at a high-school party in the summer of 1982.
“I believed he was going to rape me,” Ford said, repeating in public what she first alleged in an anonymous letter to Congress and then in an interview published 11 days ago by The Washington Post. “I tried to yell for help. When I did, Brett put his hand over my mouth to stop me from screaming. This was what terrified me the most, and has had the most lasting impact on my life. It was hard for me to breathe, and I thought that Brett was accidentally going to kill me.”
[Kavanaugh went nuclear in his opening statement Thursday]
Ford cautioned the committee that she could not “remember as much as I would like to.” But in multiple rounds of questioning, she told the senators that she was “100 percent” certain Kavanaugh attacked her and that it was “absolutely not” possible she was mistaking the identity of her assailant. And under questioning by a prosecutor selected by Republicans, she added new details about her interactions during the summer when the incident allegedly occurred.
“The details about that night that bring me here today are ones I will never forget,” Ford said in her opening statement. “They have been seared into my memory and have haunted me episodically as an adult.”
As gripping as
