was a “19-year-old college student, he visited D.C. over spring break and kissed a girl he believes was Dr. Ford. He said that kiss happened in the bedroom of a house which was a 15- to 20-minute walk from the Van Ness Metro. Ford was wearing a swimsuit under her clothing, and the kissing ended when a friend jumped on them as a joke. [He] said that the woman initiated the kissing and that he did not force himself on her.”
Another person, claiming to be a college acquaintance of Ford’s, said that Ford used to purchase drugs from another student and regularly attended his fraternity parties. According to this witness, she enjoyed a robust social life in college. Other friends from college reported similar experiences and said Ford had never demonstrated fear of rooms with single entrances.
Contemporaries of Ford’s at Holton-Arms said the least believable part of her story was how she left the party. It was inconceivable to them that she would have left Leland Keyser behind and that Keyser would not have found her abandonment to be highly noteworthy. She had always filled a protective role for Ford, so it seemed quite unlikely that she would not have become worried and made sure her friend was well. The story of a fifteen-year-old tenth-grader leaving behind the only other female at a party and then finding her way home, miles away, in pre-cell-phone 1982, with no car, no metro, and no cabs readily available is difficult to believe.
Ford’s partying and interactions with boys and young men and the attention they drew had dismayed her family. Some journalists noticed that a letter from “members of Christine Blasey Ford’s family” did not include the signatures of any blood relatives. In a story headlined “Christine Blasey Ford’s Family Has Been Nearly Silent Amid Outpouring of Support,” the Washington Post took her parents and brothers to task for failing to sign her in-laws’ letter. Her father, Ralph Blasey, responded, “I think all of the Blasey family would support her. I think her record stands for itself. Her schooling, her jobs and so on.” Later he added, “I think any father would have love for his daughter.”37
The media tended to skim over Ford’s political views, which ran decidedly to the left and were at variance with most of her family’s. Facebook friends reported that she had regularly expressed her hostility to the Trump administration before she deleted her profile around the time of Kavanaugh’s nomination. After her retreat from social media, only a few references to her political opinions remained, one mentioning a hat she wore in homage to the anti-Trump “pussy hat” protesters, another protesting Trump’s policy on border security.38
In one of the Washington Post’s deferential profiles of Ford, her husband had suggested that any strain in the family was due to those “differing political views” and misogyny: “It was a very male-dominated environment. Everyone was interested in what’s going on with the men, and the women are sidelined, and she didn’t get the attention or respect she felt she deserved.” The same article emphasized that Ford’s father and Kavanaugh’s father belonged to the same all-male golf club, Burning Tree.
The Post suggested that Ford’s family was afraid to defend her, quoting her sister-in-law as saying that supporters of sexual assault victims have trouble coming forward. Hale Boggs III, the scion of a prominent Democratic family and a friend of the Blaseys, remarked, “It’s got to be such a difficult situation for that family. It’s a very close-knit community where a lot of families know each other.”39 Still, a number of persons close to the family reported that staying silent was actually the family’s way of supporting Christine.
It was not fear of showing support for Ford that kept others in the community quiet but the opposite. While many high school acquaintances of Ford’s revealed unflattering details about her behavior in high school—some of them truly salacious—the media’s hostility to Kavanaugh made them fear for their livelihood if their names were attached to the stories. Some worried that their children’s college applications would be affected. And some were reluctant to expose Ford to the kind of ferocious public criticism to which Kavanaugh had been subjected, even if what they said was true.
A person claiming to be an acquaintance of the Blasey family told the Judiciary Committee that several persons who knew Christine in high school had information regarding her drinking and partying, but none was willing to come forward. “I wish I could say all