And the way they flanked her and interrupted her to keep from answering questions struck them as overly controlling.
The investigators on the staff of the Judiciary Committee were shocked to learn that a polygraph test, which is generally not admissible in court and is of questionable value to begin with, had been administered while Ford was mourning her grandmother’s death and preparing for a supposedly terrifying flight. Because the polygraph measures anxiety in response to questions, polygraphers usually avoid administering it against a background of psychological distress. She seemed not to know if she had been recorded, although the state of Maryland requires consent of all parties for recording and American Polygraph Association standards require polygraphs to be recorded from beginning to end. It is typical to release the audio and video of a polygraph for second opinions, but Ford and her attorneys declined to do so.
The anti-Kavanaugh forces, then, had taken some serious blows that morning, but the damage was below the surface. The running commentary in the media coalesced around the theme of Kavanaugh’s now-inevitable defeat. The White House reporter Ashley Parker, appearing on MSNBC, declared that “by the end of the day [Trump] might be willing to cut Judge Kavanaugh loose. They don’t know. This is a moving situation but the outlook now is fairly grim.” The anchorman Brian Williams responded that Trump’s own instincts were damaging Kavanaugh’s prospects. In his “inability to read the room,” the president had reportedly encouraged the judge to be “ ‘hotter’ on camera—to ad lib more, get off his talking points.” But for Kavanaugh to come in “hotter,” after Ford’s “emotional” and “very organic” testimony, Williams warned, would be “off-balance.” “That’s such a smart point,” Parker told him. If Kavanaugh appeared “indignant, more outraged, and more defiant,” he might please the president but would not “win over the room” or the general public.29
The White House was enthralled by the testimony. Everyone was watching the proceedings on the Hill, leaving the normally bustling corridors of the West Wing oddly silent. The Kavanaugh team thought that Ford had done extremely well, and they were no longer confident that the Republican senators, a handful of whom were not conservative or were consumed by antipathy to Trump, would stick together. They were less worried about Collins than Murkowski and Flake, but they knew it would be hard for Republicans to vote for Kavanaugh unless he hit a home run that afternoon.
The situation at midday revealed the risk of their strategy of not attacking Ford’s character, even though they had information that was at odds with her testimony. The ex-boyfriend had told them about her frequent flying and her history with polygraphs. Fearing a backlash against himself, he had been reluctant to speak against Ford but had relented under the weight of an official Senate investigation.
The White House had expected Ford to perform well as a witness. While they believed Kavanaugh was innocent, many of them also believed that Ford had probably suffered an assault like the one she described and had, for whatever reason, come to believe what she was saying about Kavanaugh.
False memory has been an important field of research in psychology since the 1990s, when psychologists started turning up “recovered memories,” particularly of child sexual assault and ritual satanic abuse. The theory of recovered memory is that certain events may be so traumatic that they are blocked from one’s memory and can be recovered only with certain psychological techniques, including hypnosis.
When certain “recovered” memories were proved to be impossible, Elizabeth Loftus, now a professor at the University of California at Irvine, began to study the malleability of memory and whether certain techniques were more likely to produce false memories.30 She has since become the leading researcher in the field, receiving the American Psychological Foundation’s Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement, and is one of the most frequently cited psychologists in the world.31 Loftus and others demonstrated the ease with which false memories could be suggested to research subjects who felt them to be true, and the reliability of “recovered” memories came under serious question.
While the number of therapists treating recovered memories as credible dramatically diminished in the wake of the research into the malleability of memory, at least into the 2000s there was a divergence of opinion between clinical psychologists, who were more likely to give weight to recovered memories, and researchers, who were skeptical of such memories’ reliability. The majority of research psychologists now believe that memory is malleable—that is, it can be contaminated,