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So the Kavanaugh assault accusation story got a bit stranger today, as his accuser has now said that she\u2019s unwilling to fly<\/a> to D.C., and must be granted sufficient time to drive there from California instead.\u00a0 Separately, CNN reported<\/a> that a friend described her as having long been unwilling to fly due to a fear of enclosed spaces, which, that friend said, Ford explained in a conversation \u201clate last month,\u201d was due to having been attacked, something which also caused her to insist on having two exits from any room, including all the rooms in her home.<\/p>\n So, look, I don\u2019t really know enough to say whether she\u2019s making this all up, or whether she has been so traumatized that it would be unreasonable to expect her to get on an airplane.\u00a0 (It\u2019s my understanding that the Judiciary Committee has offered to send staffers out to her so it\u2019s something of a moot point.)\u00a0 It does, in that case, make it a bit odd that the only instance in which she discussed this incident was in connection with couple\u2019s therapy, rather than as part of a more ongoing treatment.\u00a0 I\u2019m not going to say that, as a result, I disbelieve her story, but it\u2019s just strange.\u00a0 It makes me wonder if this is one of those situations in which someone has a long series of unfortunate events, and in hindsight settles on one single event as the cause, because doing so makes it easier to cope \u2014 but that in the intervening years she had attributed her woes to other reasons, rather than solely to this incident.<\/p>\n The second odd development was the series of tweets from Ed Whealen, some kind of D.C. insider, yesterday.\u00a0 They\u2019re gone now, but he apparently had accessed a yearbook in which the students\u2019 addresses were a part of their profile and, from this, he concluded that none of the purported party attendees lived near the country club which Ford identified, but identified another individual whose home was much nearer and the floor plan of which (from Zillow) matched Ford\u2019s description.\u00a0 This individual, he said, was a Kavanaugh look-alike.\u00a0 He was soundly shot down for this on twitter, with Ford insisting that she is absolutely certain it was Kavanaugh and could not possibly be anyone else, and others saying, \u201cthe neighborhoods are filled with center-entry colonials.\u201d\u00a0 And I wouldn\u2019t really have anything to say about housing types in upper-class D.C. area neighborhoods, but it did seem distinctive to me that a home that would be the site of a rich kids\u2019 party would be small enough that the bathroom would be upstairs \u2014 though I had assumed that this meant the party was in the basement.\u00a0 But it does seem to me to be a meaningful question to ask:\u00a0 if this was such a small party that she can identify all the guests, then one of those has to be the occupant of the home, and the detail of \u201cnear the country club\u201d has to fit in with that, and Whealen does say that all the other named attendees lived so far away one wouldn\u2019t reasonably identify it that way.<\/p>\n And here\u2019s the other thing that strikes me about this whole situation.\u00a0 Kavanaugh has said not that he doesn\u2019t remember such a party.\u00a0 He hasn\u2019t said, \u201cI was at so many parties, who knows?\u201d and certainly not \u201cI spent the majority of my teenage years drunk.\u201d\u00a0 He said, \u201cI was never at a party meeting that description.\u201d<\/p>\n And there are plenty of reports about the wild party scene of private high schools in the 80s (e.g., this Washington Post report<\/a>).\u00a0 And it\u2019s very easy to visualize such a party \u2013 think Sixteen Candles, though I have to say that I have no clue to what extent this is anything other than a Hollywood version of teen parties.\u00a0 But Ford\u2019s description is different:\u00a0 4 boys, 2 girls, if I understood correctly, with only Judge and Kavanaugh drinking heavily, the others with one beer each.\u00a0 So I could kinda imagine Kavanaugh having in mind something like this:\u00a0 \u201clook, I was a football player.\u00a0 I just wouldn\u2019t have gone to a party with so few people.\u00a0 If there wasn\u2019t a keg, it wouldn\u2019t have been worth my time.\u00a0 I would hardly advise this for anyone today, but that was how I spent my time.\u201d<\/p>\n I mean, sure, in my world, it was perfectly normal to get together in groups of a half-dozen.\u00a0 But we wouldn\u2019t have called it a party, we would have called it \u201changing out at so-and-so\u2019s house.\u201d\u00a0 And the idea of two boys attacking a girl who\u2019s gone to use the bathroom makes a lot more sense in the sort of house party where there are kids everywhere and no one\u2019s really paying any attention to whatever else is going on.\u00a0 Now I\u2019ve seen speculation along the lines of \u201cyeah, the norm might have been wild house parties but this might have been the one where the hordes just hadn\u2019t arrived yet, or where for whatever reason the host hadn\u2019t adequately gotten the word out.\u201d<\/p>\n So anyway \u2014 what I was thinking about when I sat down to write is this:\u00a0 I\u2019ve seen a lot of speculation on what caused Feinstein not to act, and then caused staffers to leak this accusation (or whatever it was that actually happened), and what makes sense to me is for Feinstein and others to have deemed this accusation too weak, but for others to have rejected that, and particularly for them to have expected that, in the same way as the multiple Roy Moore accusers corroborated each other, that, once this accusation was made public, other women would say, \u201cyes, this happened to me, too.\u201d<\/p>\n That hasn\u2019t happened.\u00a0 No one has made any sort of claim about Kavanaugh \u2014 only about \u201chis type.\u201d\u00a0 The Holten Arms women who signed the letter of support<\/a> had no personal knowledge but said, in a letter now on its own website<\/a>,<\/p>\n Dr. Blasey Ford\u2019s experience is all too consistent with stories we heard and lived while attending Holton. Many of us are survivors ourselves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I do not have the expertise to evaluate the truth behind Ford\u2019s or Kavanaugh\u2019s claims.\u00a0 What\u2019s more, even from just what\u2019s been circulating recently, I have the understanding that there are two competing points of view, even among experts, about memories about upsetting events:\u00a0 some people believe that the core memory is real, unshakable even if details (in this case, where, when) are lost, so that Ford\u2019s identification of Kavanaugh is definitive; other people say that, no, this is a myth, and memories can be reconstructed into being quite different than the actual past, especially if this is an incident which was shoved into the past and only became viewed as a formative event much later \u2014 so that the details may have been fuzzy to Ford at the time of the therapy session in 2012 but reports circulating then that if Romney won the election he\u2019d pick Kavanaugh, could have caused her to identify the attacker as him.<\/p>\n But it does trouble me that many of Ford\u2019s supporters are using Kavanaugh as a stand-in for all such men who have been perpetrators in the past, or, rather, that they believe Ford unhesitatingly because they \u201cknow that type\u201d and that\u2019s enough of a reason for them.\u00a0 For them, \u201cMeToo\u201d has transformed itself into a conviction that men are, for the most part, perpetrators with skeletons in their closest.<\/p>\n And now I\u2019d really like for this to end, because we\u2019re all getting sucked into a rabbit hole.<\/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":" So the Kavanaugh assault accusation story got a bit stranger today, as his accuser has now said that she\u2019s unwilling to fly to D.C., and must be granted sufficient time to drive there from California instead.\u00a0 Separately, CNN reported that a friend described her as having long been unwilling to fly due to a fear […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":11070,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1056,1071],"class_list":["post-11079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-brett-kavanaugh","tag-politics-red"],"yoast_head":"\n