of information given for the alleged victim. The only information provided was the possible name of the victim, an email address, and an alleged sexual assault with no details of location aside from ‘a private party in Seattle.’ The allegation also stated that the alleged sexual assault was unreported and had occurred in 2012. I discussed . . . that if this crime had occurred, the statute of limitations for this incident would have expired.” She tried to reach the alleged victim by email but received no response and closed the investigation.
The Senate Republicans had handled the allegation discreetly, sending it to the appropriate law enforcement authority upon receipt, and not contacting public relations teams or attorneys—in notable contrast to the way Senator Feinstein had handled Ford’s allegation. By the eve of the hearing, the conversation among senators and their staff had shifted from the possibility that Kavanaugh had attempted to rape multiple women to Kavanaugh’s having drunk more beer than people realized.
Because newsrooms were structurally biased against conservatives, they didn’t realize the anger that their one-sided coverage was provoking. William Bennett noted that the “perfect storm of controversy” had turned the Kavanaugh hearing into “the culture war on steroids.”75
CHAPTER EIGHT
Fear of Flying
After all the delaying tactics, Senate staffers still weren’t entirely sure that Ford was going to show up for the hearing on Thursday, September 27. Many assumed that she would be a no-show or that some new allegation would derail the proceedings again.
Grassley had assured Ford’s attorneys that he would do everything in his power to “provide a safe, comfortable, and dignified forum.” The hearing would be held in the Dirksen building, with its smaller committee room. The large size of the room in Hart had contributed to the “circus atmosphere” of the first set of hearings.
Grassley’s staff tried to accommodate the requests of Ford’s legal and public relations teams, acquiescing to the request for breaks during her testimony, allowing only one video camera at the hearing, excluding Kavanaugh from the room during her testimony, and providing security. They declined her demands that Kavanaugh testify first, that Mark Judge be subpoenaed, and that only senators ask questions.
There were no female Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee, and the Republicans worried that the spectacle of Ford facing an all-male bank of GOP senators would be a public relations nightmare. The media would interpret questions that were in any way pointed as further harassment of a victim of a brutal sexual assault.
The Republicans on the committee therefore pushed to hire a female attorney with expertise in such sensitive questioning. They did not need a hearing that scored political points but one that elicited facts to shore up the confidence of Republican senators. It wasn’t that they could not trust the senators to ask appropriate questions so much as that they knew the media would spin whatever happened as badgering of Ford, as they had done in Justice Thomas’s hearing.
After interviewing candidates on the previous Saturday, before the hearing date was even set, they selected Rachel Mitchell, a respected sex crimes prosecutor from Maricopa County, Arizona. With her long and distinguished background working with victims, even teaching courses in how to interview victims compassionately to get to the truth, she was the perfect choice. She was a government attorney, so she had no law partners who had to approve her appearance. For political reasons, several attorneys had already been forbidden by their firms to participate. And it didn’t hurt that Mitchell was from Senator Flake’s state, since he was known to be uneasy about how to balance concern for Ford and fairness to Kavanaugh. When the committee staff interviewed Mitchell, they told her that a previous interviewee had described herself as a bulldog. She laughed and told them if that was what they wanted, she was not the right person. She had built up a career of dealing with sex crime victims and would be returning to that job. She had to be true to herself.
Despite their previous outrage that male senators might ask Ford questions, Democrats and the media were outraged by the plan. “Handing off the questioning of Dr. Blasey to female staff members would be a gross departure from Senate practice and based on the risible idea that the questioning of sexual assault survivors is ‘women’s work,’ ” declared Lara Bazelon in a New York Times op-ed titled “A Sexist, Cowardly Ploy.”1 In fact, the Senate had hired outside counsel for important hearings on a number of occasions, including