arranging a ride home would not have been easy,” Mitchell noted. The difficulty of finding such a ride would have likely made it a salient part of the evening in and of itself.
Ford’s account had never been corroborated by anyone, including her lifelong friend and supporter Leland Keyser. All alleged eyewitnesses denied having any memory of the event.
Ford had also not offered a consistent account of the alleged assault, Mitchell wrote, offering conflicting information about whether she could hear conversations taking place elsewhere at the party.
Ford’s account of who was at the party had also varied. According to her therapist’s notes, four boys were in the bedroom in which she was assaulted—an error, according to the Washington Post, as there were four boys at the party but only two in the room where the assault happened. In her letter to Senator Feinstein, Ford described the party as including “me and 4 others.” Her polygraph statement said four boys and two girls were at the party. In her opening testimony, Ford said that four boys and her female friend Leland Ingham Keyser were at the party, but in response to Mitchell’s questions, she said that Leland was one of the four others at the party and she remembered no others. In her statement to the polygrapher and in a text to the Post, she asserted that Patrick “P. J.” Smyth was a “bystander,” but in her testimony she said that was inaccurate.
She also had trouble remembering recent events presumably unaffected by the trauma of an assault or the vagaries of time, such as whether she had showed a reporter her therapist’s notes and whether her polygraph session had been recorded. She refused to provide the therapist’s notes to the committee despite relying on them for “corroboration.” She said she had wanted her story to remain confidential, but the “first person other than her therapist or husband to whom she disclosed the identity of her alleged attacker” was a person operating a tip line at the Washington Post. The college professor said she did not know how to contact a U.S. senator, but she did know how to contact her U.S. representative.
Ford could not remember if her polygraph had been conducted the day of or the day after her grandmother’s funeral, an event that should have been significant to her. Regardless, it would have been inappropriate to administer a polygraph to someone in grief.
Ford’s frequent flying was at odds with the assertion that she was afraid to fly, Mitchell noted. It was also noteworthy that her attorneys had apparently not told her about offers for a private hearing in California, a breach of duty to their client that Senator Cornyn suggested warranted a referral to their local bar ethics committee.23
The measured report from Mitchell, based on facts, was completely different from the media coverage, which was focused on emotion. Mitchell’s findings were ignored by many media outlets or seriously downplayed. The findings were buried in the final two paragraphs of a New York Times story about the FBI investigation.24
A supposed “fact check” by the New York Times cited no factual errors but pushed activists’ assertions that Kavanaugh had been “misleading” and that his statements were “disputed” or “required context.”25 The article was self-refuting. For instance, it reported that he denied drinking to excess immediately before quoting him as saying, “Sometimes I had too many beers.”
At the same time, few media outlets were investigating Kavanaugh’s accusers. For example, Ford said that she had not told her husband the details of the assault until 2012. The occasion for her doing so, she said, was serious marital conflict arising out of her desire for a second front door on their $2.5 million house in Palo Alto, California—an escape hatch, as it were, for a woman traumatized by sexual assault. This odd story did not hold up under scrutiny. According to one of the only reporters to investigate, building permits for renovations on the home—which included an extra room and extra door—were completed by 2010. The door was not an escape route but an additional entrance. Ford said in her testimony she “hosted” Google interns in the additional space. And curiously, the woman who sold the house to the Fords in 2007, a marriage therapist, reportedly had continued to work out of the home, using the extra room, with its own door, for her practice.26 A web profile says she deals with “relationship issues” and “disturbing memories from the past.”27