Facebook Live. With the New York Times and Washington Post serving as the public relations arm of the anti-Kavanaugh movement, conservative media began breaking stories and debunking false story lines. Later, Christopher Scalia, a son of the late justice, tweeted, “Imagine what these past few weeks would have been like without a strong conservative media presence to fight the bias and credulity of so many other outlets.” Robert Bork Jr. pointedly responded, “Yes. Yes, I can.”63
Grassley kept extending the deadline for Ford to accept the offer to testify. He had initially set it for Friday morning, then Friday afternoon, then Friday night.64 Late Friday, after Ford’s attorney called the deadline “arbitrary” and an attempt to “bully” her, he moved it to 2:30 p.m. on Saturday. Unappeased, Katz told the committee in an email, “The imposition of aggressive and artificial deadlines regarding the date and conditions of any hearing has created tremendous and unwarranted anxiety and stress on Dr. Ford. Your cavalier treatment of a sexual assault survivor who has been doing her best to cooperate with the Committee is completely inappropriate.”65
Senator Grassley, who believed he had been more than fair, grew exasperated. He tweeted, “With all the extensions we give Dr. Ford to decide if she still wants to testify to the Senate I feel like I’m playing 2nd trombone in the judiciary orchestra and Schumer is the conductor.”66 In reality, the people calling the shots were Republican senators who insisted they needed a public hearing to feel comfortable voting for Kavanaugh. Collins joined Judiciary Committee Republicans in insisting on accommodating Ford. She thought it silly to fight over which day of the week Ford would testify. If the Senate needed to send a plane or a private car to get her, that was fine as well.
On Friday, the Judiciary Committee offered to move the hearing from Monday to Wednesday, one day sooner than she had requested. Some of Kavanaugh’s defenders saw the further delay as more time to dredge up outrageous charges, and they worried that Katz wanted to wait until Thursday so she could coordinate other allegations or witnesses.
The committee staff felt they had bent over backwards to meet most of Ford’s conditions, but as they wrote to her attorneys, “Some of your other demands, however, are unreasonable and we are unable to accommodate them. You demanded that Judge Kavanaugh be the first person to testify. Accommodating this demand would be an affront to fundamental notions of due process. In the United States, an individual accused of a crime is entitled to a presumption of innocence.”67 They also insisted that the committee would designate its own lawyer to conduct the questioning.68
Just before midnight on Friday, Grassley tweeted that after five extensions, Ford needed to let him know if she would testify or not.69 In another tweet a few minutes later, he told Kavanaugh that he had granted yet another extension and that he hoped the judge would understand.70
The media reported unquestioningly Ford’s assertion that she was so scarred by the attempted rape in 1982 that she required multiple doors and exit routes in rooms and was unable to travel by airplane, “the ultimate closed space where you cannot get away.”71 The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin lambasted the Republican senators: “They tell a woman who needs to drive cross country she can’t have one extra day. None of these people should be in office.”72
That night, the Judiciary Committee’s communications advisor, Garrett Ventry, resigned after NBC published an anonymous report that he had been fired from a job in the North Carolina legislature after an allegation of sexual harassment, an allegation he denied. NBC reported that Republicans felt he “could not lead an effective communications response,” implying that Ventry’s colleagues did not support him. In fact, the “Republicans” referred to were not members of the U.S. Senate or of the judiciary staff but a source in North Carolina, as the reporter, Heidi Przybyla, confirmed to Grassley’s staff.73 Nevertheless, NBC refused to correct the story unless Grassley would agree to provide comment for the story.
The environment in which the Judiciary Committee staff had to work was verging on the intolerable. “It was no longer like drinking out of a fire hose. It was learning how to grow gills at that point,” said Taylor Foy, the communications director for Grassley. When he had scheduled his wedding for October 4, he hadn’t dreamed how stressful the closing weeks of his engagement would be. His bride would wear a “Confirm Kavanaugh” button for her