the appointment promised to shift the ideological balance of the Court, liberal activists prepared a reprise of the campaign that had prevented Robert Bork’s confirmation four years earlier. The Judiciary Committee hearings in September were brutal and prolonged. Thomas testified for more than twenty-four hours over five days, longer than any Supreme Court nominee to that point save Bork himself. The committee’s vote on his nomination was seven to seven, all Republicans and one Democrat voting in his favor. The nomination was sent to the full Senate for consideration on September 27.
Two days before his expected confirmation, Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio and Timothy Phelps of Newsday both disclosed allegations of sexual harassment against Thomas by a young law professor named Anita Hill, who had worked under him at two federal agencies. The accusation had been leaked from the FBI’s background investigation, probably by a Democratic staff member.17 (In fact, the confidential closed-door session with senators that Feinstein intentionally sidestepped was instituted in 1992 by then-chairman Joe Biden in response to the debacle, in which Thomas’s reputation was damaged by an unsupported allegation.) The confirmation vote was suspended, and the hearings were reopened. From October 11 through 13, the nation’s attention was riveted on the dramatic, often wrenching, testimony of the nominee and his accuser.18 Thomas was confirmed by a vote of fifty-two to forty-eight, the closest for a Supreme Court appointment since the nineteenth century. Opinion polls found that the American public, by a two-to-one margin, had not found Hill’s allegations credible. The balance of opinion was similar among both men and women and among both blacks and whites.
Early Sunday morning, Emma Brown of the Washington Post left a voicemail for Kavanaugh. She was about to publish a lengthy story that would detail an allegation of sexual assault against him. This was the first time Kavanaugh heard the name of his accuser: Christine Blasey Ford.
He was shocked to hear his name used in the same sentence as the term “sexual assault,” and when he heard the woman’s name, he realized that her accusation was not about something misinterpreted on a date. He did not remember who she was or what high school she had attended, so he called a high school friend to ask if the accuser’s name rang a bell. Kavanaugh went to Georgetown Preparatory School, an all-boys school in North Bethesda, Maryland, and he and his schoolmates had socialized with students from several other single-sex schools in the Washington area. His friend remembered Blasey, who had attended the all-girls Holton-Arms School, also in Bethesda, and immediately shared some of his unfavorable impressions of her from her high school days.
Kavanaugh went downstairs to tell Ashley about the phone call from the reporter. It was possible that he had met his accuser when they were in high school, he said, but he never went out with her and had never been in an intimate situation with her. It went without saying that he had never attempted to rape her. Ashley responded calmly and expressed her support. Believing that everything happens for a reason, she assured him that they’d get through it.
Kavanaugh also called McGahn and Shah to tell them about the Post story. Shah, who was in Connecticut, where his mother was recovering from a brain aneurysm, spoke with Emma Brown from the hospital. She shared a few details, such as the names of Ford and others she said were present at the incident.
Brown had been working on the story with Ford since early July, when Kavanaugh’s name was still on the short list of potential nominees.19 Just a few hours after Brown’s call to Kavanaugh, the story was published. It was explosive.
The angle chosen by the reporter was that Ford did not want to go public, but that the Intercept and New Yorker stories had exposed her allegation without her consent. Amid the intense speculation about the identity of Kavanaugh’s accuser, she preferred to tell the story herself.
That story was a remarkable combination of vagueness and specificity:
[O]ne summer in the early 1980s, Kavanaugh and a friend—both “stumbling drunk,” Ford alleges—corralled her into a bedroom during a gathering of teenagers at a house in Montgomery County. 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