{"id":11049,"date":"2018-09-16T20:52:44","date_gmt":"2018-09-17T02:52:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=11049"},"modified":"2018-09-16T20:52:44","modified_gmt":"2018-09-17T02:52:44","slug":"the-kavanaugh-sexual-assault-allegation-when-we-cant-know-the-truth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2018\/09\/the-kavanaugh-sexual-assault-allegation-when-we-cant-know-the-truth.html","title":{"rendered":"The Kavanaugh sexual assault allegation: when we can’t know the truth"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/p>\n

The accuser of Brett Kavanaugh now has a name:\u00a0 Christine Blasey Ford.\u00a0 And the details, such as they are, are now in a Washington Post article<\/a>:<\/p>\n

While his friend watched, she said, Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed on her back and groped her over her clothes, grinding his body against hers and clumsily attempting to pull off her one-piece bathing suit and the clothing she wore over it. When she tried to scream, she said, he put his hand over her mouth.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought he might inadvertently kill me,\u201d said Ford, now a 51-year-old research psychologist in northern California. \u201cHe was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ford said she was able to escape when Kavanaugh\u2019s friend and classmate at Georgetown Preparatory School, Mark Judge, jumped on top of them, sending all three tumbling. She said she ran from the room, briefly locked herself in a bathroom and then fled the house.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She reports never having told anyone but the time but<\/p>\n

Years later, after going through psychotherapy, Ford said, she came to understand the incident as a trauma with lasting impact on her life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and therapist\u2019s notes dated as 2012, appear to corroborate her story.<\/p>\n

Here are some possible explanations:<\/p>\n

1. She made it up entirely.\u00a0 Reports are that her social media presence has been erased \u2014 and so completely that even her Linkedin account<\/a> is now \u201cChristine B.\u201d at Stanford.\u00a0 Is that because she wanted to not only eliminate the opportunity to harass her, but also to hide her political causes?\u00a0 There\u2019s no way of knowing.\u00a0 But given the level of extreme rhetoric, that Kavanaugh would be the source of untold deaths due to the overturning of Roe v. Wade and finding for plaintiffs in a lawsuit seeking to end pre-existing condition insurance coverage protections, and would result in unchecked corruption at the White House, and all manner of other dire consequences, it\u2019s not hard to believe that someone would be convinced that the situation calls for an accusation like this, with respect to someone that she had a passing acquaintance with in high school.\u00a0 Yes, her husband and therapist are in on it, too.\u00a0 Are the therapists\u2019 notes provably from 2012?<\/p>\n

Yes, I agree, this is unlikely.\u00a0 But there has been so much sensationalist rhetoric that I suspect there are a significant number of people who, if they thought they had the chance, would feel it perfectly justified to falsify a claim if they felt it would protect all of the potential victims of a Kavanaugh Supreme Court decision.<\/p>\n

2.\u00a0 Something<\/em> happened, with some boy whose identity she hadn\u2019t really remembered, but she made the association with Kavanaugh so many years after the fact because of his appearances in the news, either prior to the 2012 therapist\u2019s sessions (if she told him the name at the time) or just now (if she only connected the nameless high school boy to Kavanaugh when he made the news).\u00a0 Whether the details are even as she recalls them, or whether, with the passage of time, this event, which was a formative event in her life, unintentionally evolved into something quite different, we can\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

3.\u00a0 Kavanaugh was indeed the drunk boy, but he didn\u2019t really get any further than first base and we can\u2019t really say whether, had his friend not stopped him (because the details are confusing but it seems more like the friend was stopping rather than trying to join in on the whatever-was-happening), he would have actually raped her.\u00a0 As to his denial, he could be truthful, that is, have the intent of being truthful if (a) he was black-out drunk and\/or (b) if his perception of what happened was so radically different than hers that it wasn\u2019t a memorable event to him, so that in his mind, he never did any such thing.<\/p>\n

4.\u00a0 Kavanaugh was drunk, but not so drunk as to not be in full control of his actions and remember everything, and intended to catch her alone and rape her, remembers everything and is lying now.<\/p>\n

But how \u2014 how\u00a0on earth \u2014 do we respond to this?\u00a0 If we believe her, but it\u2019s actually not true, then an injustice is perpetrated on Kavanaugh, and we\u2019ve created an environment in which people can fabricate 11th-hour accusations with impunity.\u00a0 If we believe him, and he\u2019s lying then we have a Supreme Court justice who, in the worst case, was a rapist, and won\u2019t own up to it (e.g., \u201cI treated girls unjustly in high school, but then I learned this was wrong\u201d).<\/p>\n

Now maybe in the former case we say, \u201cno one has a right to Supreme Court confirmation, so there\u2019s no actual injustice happening,\u201d but it sets a very disturbing precedent that one can destroy a potential confirmation with last-minute unproven accuastion.\u00a0 Where does this end?<\/p>\n

And it doesn\u2019t appear that we\u2019ll get much corroborative or exculpatory evidence, either.\u00a0 The story doesn\u2019t quite hang together:\u00a0 the therapist\u2019s notes say four boys in the attack, she says the notes were wrong and there were merely four boys at the party.\u00a0 The other boy is described as being a second perpetrator, but the action of \u201cjumping on\u201d Ford and Kavanaugh reads more as disrupting than anything else.\u00a0 But I don\u2019t think this proves that it\u2019s a false accusation.\u00a0 There is no date other than probably summer of 1982.\u00a0 We know of no one else at the party, which is reasonable enough \u2014 some of us can just scroll through our Facebook friends list to find high school classmates, but it\u2019s hardly evidence of anything if Ford can\u2019t or didn\u2019t.\u00a0 And the absence of other accusers doesn\u2019t in itself prove anything, either.<\/p>\n

But that also means that claims that \u201cthis should be investigated\u201d aren\u2019t really going to get anywhere.\u00a0 What is there to investigate?\u00a0 Maybe I lack enough imagination to see how an investigation could turn up more information.\u00a0 There\u2019s so little to go on:\u00a0 some party in the summer, at someone\u2019s house.\u00a0 Maybe someone\u2019s already gone to the media saying, \u201cI was there; I remember this\u201d but one presumes that, if this was a party no different than countless others these teenagers attended, then these teenagers are unlikely to remember anything distinctive about this one, let alone anything as specific as \u201cshe went upstairs, the boys followed her, then she never came back.\u201d\u00a0 Is it a matter of having Ford testify? \u2014 I\u2019m not sure that this would be meaningful, if it just means that senators, and the public, are called on to make their decision based on how sympathetic a witness she appears to be.<\/p>\n

So where do we go from here?\u00a0 Should Kavanaugh be pulled from the nomination for avoidance of doubt?\u00a0 Or would the Democrats find similar reasons to disqualify any alternative nominee?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m interested in what readers think \u2014 but not if you hated Kavanaugh and are happy for this matter to have come up, because that\u2019s not particularly meaningful.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Image:\u00a0\u00a0https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Judge_Brett_Michael_Kavanaugh.jpg; By U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The accuser of Brett Kavanaugh now has a name:\u00a0 Christine Blasey Ford.\u00a0 And the details, such as they are, are now in a Washington Post article: While his friend watched, she said, Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed on her back and groped her over her clothes, grinding his body against hers and clumsily attempting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1056,1059],"class_list":["post-11049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-brett-kavanaugh","tag-sexual-assault-accuastions"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Kavanaugh sexual assault allegation: when we can't know the truth<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The accuser of Brett Kavanaugh now has a name:\u00a0 Christine Blasey Ford.\u00a0 And the details, such as they are, are now in a Washington Post 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