interview Ford, offering every accommodation, even proposing to take her testimony in California, but her attorneys declined, insisting on a public hearing.
The chairman then explained the limitations of FBI investigations, which would simply take witness statements in the same manner the committee had done, with the same legal penalty for making false statements. He noted that the attorneys for those making the other high-profile accusations against Kavanaugh had not cooperated either, nor had they made any attempt to substantiate their claims.
The ranking member, Senator Feinstein, followed with her own opening statement, admitting that she had kept Ford’s letter a secret for six weeks but then complaining about the speed with which the committee moved once the allegation was public: “What I find most inexcusable is this rush to judgment.”
Noting Ford’s blue suit, Feinstein said, “Twenty-seven years ago, I was walking through an airport when I saw a large group of people gathered around a TV to listen to Anita Hill tell her story. What I saw was an attractive woman in a blue suit before an all-male Judiciary Committee speaking of her experience of sexual harassment.” The media began discussing the “symbolic meaning” of Ford’s blue suit, comparing it to the teal suit that Hill had worn.4
With that, Ford began her opening statement: “I am here today not because I want to be. I am terrified. I am here because I believe it is my civic duty to tell you what happened to me while Brett Kavanaugh and I were in high school.” She spoke in the high-pitched, almost childlike voice that friends remembered from high school—the voice that earned her the nickname “Baby Love” from some of her classmates.
Ford talked about her childhood in suburban Washington and how she came to know Kavanaugh, “the boy who sexually assaulted me.” One evening in the summer of 1982, she said, after a day spent swimming at the Columbia Country Club in Chevy Chase, Maryland, she attended a “small gathering at a house in the Bethesda area.” There were “four boys I remember specifically being at the house,” along with her friend Leland. She did not remember how the group came together, though she surmised it was, like many other such gatherings, spontaneous. She did not remember where they were, whose house it was, or how she got there, but she would never forget the details of the assault. “They have been seared into my memory and have haunted me episodically as an adult.”
She had consumed only one beer, she said, while Kavanaugh was “visibly drunk.” She was on her way to the bathroom when she was attacked from behind and pushed into a bedroom. Kavanaugh and Mark Judge “came into the bedroom and locked the door behind them.” Kavanaugh got on top of her on a bed and manhandled her, she said. “I yelled, hoping that someone downstairs might hear me, and I tried to get away from him, but his weight was heavy.” Kavanaugh put his hand over her mouth, she testified, and she feared he was going to kill her.
Kavanaugh was laughing and having a good time, she said, while Judge was alternatively urging him on and telling him to stop. Judge jumped on the bed, causing Kavanaugh and her to tumble off. That was when she ran out of the room and locked herself in the bathroom. The two boys left the room, loudly “pinballing off the walls on the way down” the stairs. She left the house, she said, relieved that they didn’t follow her.
Ford said she told no one about the incident at the time. Before sharing the story with the Washington Post and her congresswoman, Anna Eshoo, in July, she had given only a vague account to a few persons in recent years. She told her husband she had experienced a sexual assault before they were married and discussed it more fully in marital counseling in 2012. More recently, she had mentioned the attack in other therapy sessions and to friends.
“My hope was that providing the information confidentially would be sufficient to allow the Senate to consider Mr. Kavanaugh’s serious misconduct without having to make myself, my family, or anyone’s family vulnerable to the personal attacks and invasions of privacy that we have faced since my name became public,” she said.
She struggled with whether to come forward, eventually deciding not to. But “once the press started reporting on the existence of the letter I had sent to Senator Feinstein,” reporters started showing up at her