On September 16, the world learned the identity of Kavanaugh’s high school accuser in The Washington Post.
Ford had come to realize that her name was going to emerge one way or another, and that it was better to recount the experience in her own words. Senator Kamala Harris, the assurgent California lawmaker who was soon to announce a presidential bid, had learned of the existence of Ford’s letter—if not its author—and was pressuring Feinstein to brief Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats on it. So Ford turned back to Emma Brown, the Post reporter who had first responded to her anonymous early July tip.
“Emma was not pushy and was respectful,” said Koegler, who lived through Ford’s deliberations. “So that was who got the story.”
Early in the week of September 10, Brown traveled to California to interview Ford. But Ford, who asked Brown to hold off on publication until she was sure she was ready to be unmasked, remained deeply uneasy about the prospect of thrusting herself and her family into an often unforgiving spotlight.
“Literally right up to the publication deadline, she was not sure,” Koegler said.
Then came the Intercept story on Wednesday—which contained the broad strokes of the Ford recollections without her name—and the briefing of committee Democrats that Harris had argued for. Knowing that her story was now a news event that was unlikely to recede anytime soon, Ford gave the green light to Brown. Her story was published online on a Sunday afternoon and on the front page of the Post’s paper edition the following morning.
The impact was immediate. Reporters swarmed around the Ford house in Palo Alto, prompting neighbors to warn Christine off staying at home. Russell, driving one of their sons back from a soccer tournament in Lake Tahoe, was overwhelmed with incoming calls and messages. The couple’s friend Elizabeth Hewitt had taken the Fords’ other son to a local swim club along with her own children while her husband, Keith Koegler, monitored the television coverage at home. While he was doing that, Christine researched hotel options and responded to her own flood of messages. Many were supportive. Some on social media or sent to her professional email address, however, were quite menacing.
Around the nation, people far removed from Palo Alto and Washington were reeling at the news. The backdrop of an intense national #MeToo movement, the public sensitivity to a president who had boasted of grabbing women “by the pussy,” the possibility of a Supreme Court candidate who might prove the decisive vote in overturning Roe v. Wade, and Ford’s demonstrable proximity to Kavanaugh’s high school circle all combined to throw Kavanaugh’s candidacy into serious jeopardy.
Ford immediately drew comparisons to Anita Hill in 1991; her story involved mistreatment by a male Supreme Court nominee that was sexual in nature. Like Hill, Ford had never intended to share her experience. But, once drawn into the public fight, Ford—like Hill—would prove unwavering in her account.
Suddenly, a confirmation process whose biggest flashpoint so far had been a tiff over concealed documents was mired in full-blown scandal. The Judicial Crisis Network, a conservative dark-money group, would end up spending about $22 million in campaign-like videos to support Kavanaugh (“For conservatives, he’s a grand slam”). The National Rifle Association also spent large sums (“Your right to self-defense depends on this vote”). Demand Justice, a liberal group, focused on pressuring Republican senators to oppose Kavanaugh.
Republicans tried to take control of events, arguing that the release of the Ford letter was a last-ditch effort by Democrats to scuttle Kavanaugh’s nomination. Particularly galling to them was the fact that Feinstein had met with Kavanaugh about his nomination and yet said nothing, which became a popular talking point among conservatives.
“When Senator Feinstein sat with Judge Kavanaugh for a long period of time—a long, long meeting—she had this letter. Why didn’t she bring it up?” Trump said at a September 18 news conference. “Why didn’t the Democrats bring it up then? Because they obstruct and because they resist. That’s the name of their campaign against me.”
Even some Democrats were frustrated with Feinstein, whom they felt had mishandled the situation by not sharing the letter with investigators or her colleagues. California state senator Kevin de León, who was vying for Feinstein’s seat the following month, accused her of wanting to “assist” and not “resist” the president and his policy agenda. But Feinstein had not felt she had any option. Months later, in email responses to questions for this book, she still sounded vexed by the position she had found herself in and the mountain of criticism that resulted.
“I stand by my decision to not forward her letter to the FBI until after the media had made the story public,” Senator Feinstein wrote. “Dr. Ford repeatedly requested confidentiality and I honored those requests.”
Some Republicans seemed more open to Ford’s story. Arizona senator Jeff Flake, who heard about the Post’s piece while traveling in Utah, immediately called for a hearing so that Ford could testify.
“I felt strongly that she needed to be heard,” Flake said in an interview later. “And after fits and starts, a lot of my colleagues agreed.” Some senators wanted to have the hearing the following day. That, however, proved unrealistic.
The immediate question was whether Ford would come forward in person and testify publicly about her recollections. On September 17, Ford’s lawyer Debra Katz told CNN that her client was willing to do so. Kavanaugh himself was arguing for an immediate hearing. Committee Republicans scheduled one for Monday, September 24. Staffers also arranged for a sworn telephone interview with Kavanaugh on September 17. On that call, he unequivocally denied all allegations made by Ford.
The Holton-Arms community began weighing in on behalf of their former student. Susanna Jones, its head of school, lauded Ford’s coming forward: “As a school that empowers women to use their voices, we are proud of this alumna for using hers.” Still, Jones was in an awkward position, given that the Holton community ran the political gamut. Justice Gorsuch’s daughter was one of her students. And Kimberly Jackson, a 2008 graduate, had been selected provisionally by Kavanaugh to clerk on the Supreme Court if he was confirmed.
Twenty-three members of Ford’s 1984 class sent a letter to the committee attesting to their classmate’s “honesty, integrity, and intelligence.” More than six hundred Holton alumnae signed a letter saying that Ford’s “experience is all too consistent with stories we heard and lived while attending Holton. Many of us are survivors ourselves.”
For Ford, however, the warm words of confidence were being drowned out by violent threats to her safety and well-being. On Tuesday, September 18, Katz and her law partner Lisa Banks wrote to Grassley that, since their client’s name had gone public, “her worst fears have materialized.”
Ford had been targeted for “vicious harassment” and even death threats, they noted, and her family had been forced to relocate. Katz and Banks also said Ford had been impersonated online and that her email had been hacked. The attorneys took issue with the committee’s hastily scheduled public hearing and the idea that she should “testify at the same table as Judge Kavanaugh . . . to relive this traumatic and harrowing incident. The hearing was scheduled for six short days from today and would include interrogation by Senators who appear to have made up their minds that she is ‘mistaken’ and ‘mixed up.’ . . . No sexual assault survivor should be subjected to such an ordeal.” An FBI investigation was the logical first step before scheduling such a hearing, the lawyers argued.
That same day, Mark Judge and Patrick Smyth, two of the three other boys Ford recalled being present at the party where she was assaulted, said they had no memory of the gathering and had never seen Kavanaugh engage in any such misconduct.
“I do not recall the party described in Dr. Ford’s letter,” Judge said in a September 18 letter to Senate leaders, issued by his lawyer, Barbara “Biz” Van Gelder, of the firm Cozen O’Connor.
Smyth said the same day through his own lawyer, Eric Bruce, of the firm Kobre & Kim, “I have no knowledge of the party in question; nor do I have any knowledge of the allegedly improper conduct she has leveled against Brett Kavanaugh.”
The firestorm Ford now faced was harsher and meaner than she’d anticipated. In addition to the email hacking and security threats, she was deluged with hate mail and attacked viciously on social-media channels like Facebook and Twitter. Her home address was publicized, paving the way for unwanted visits, vandalism, or worse. Her family and friends on both coasts were besieged by journalists. She realized that she’d not only have to live elsewhere for a while but also take time off from teaching.
Genuinely frightened, Ford met with local FBI agents to report the many security issues. She also arranged for a costly protective detail that began on September 19, just seventy-two hours after the Washington Post story had been published. Ron Conway, a local angel investor who had helped launch Airbnb and had heard of Ford’s troubles through a mutual friend, helped her identify a security team to hire. Along with some travel security costs and local housing expenses, that team was ultimately paid for by a GoFundMe account arranged by Ford’s friends and colleagues. But at the time, it wasn’t at all clear whether the Ford family would have enough money to cover their expenses.
The GoFundMe campaign eventually blew far past its goal of $150,000, raising a total of more than $647,000 in a little over two months. (In late November, Ford would shut down the site with a note of thanks, saying any unused funds would be directed to “organizations that support trauma survivors.”)
The Palo Alto community also showed its support in other, more public ways. Local activists chartered a plane to fly above the city with a sign that read THANK YOU, CHRISTINE. WE HAVE YOUR BACK. A Sunday-night vigil at the corner of Embarcadero Road and El Camino Real attracted more than a thousand well-wishers, some of them young women. Holding candles and signs that read GO CHRISTINE! and BELIEVE WOMEN, they cheered at passing drivers who supportively honked their horns and spoke out about the dangers of staying silent about sexual assault. “My daughter has to know that if something were to happen to her, she’s just a couple of years younger than Christine was then,” one of the participants, Mora Oommenn, told the San Jose Mercury-News, “so she needs to know that we’re behind her, that there are adults who will listen to her and her experience will be taken seriously.”
Meanwhile, Team Kavanaugh was bracing for battle. On Wednesday, September 19, Mike Davis, Grassley’s lieutenant, trumpeted on Twitter: “Unfazed and Determined. We will confirm Judge Kavanaugh.”
That tweet did not go over well among Kavanaugh’s critics. After Twitter commentators accused him of bias, Davis backtracked the next morning, posting a tweet that said, “To clear up any confusion, I was referring to Democrats’ partisan political attacks and their refusal to take part in the committee’s thorough and fair investigation. I deleted the tweet to avoid any further misinterpretation by left wing media as so often happens on Twitter.”
In reality, Davis’s tweets were an intentional ploy meant to serve as a bat signal to the right—rallying it to wake up to what was at stake—and they worked. Watching him come under fire for defending a bread-and-butter GOP judicial nominee only endeared Davis—and, by extension, Kavanaugh—further to their party. “I heard you caused a ruckus,” Grassley, whose distaste for political mudslinging was continually evident to Davis, would later say. But the senator’s trust in his aide continued unabated. Grassley always backed his staff, and, having started his career in the senator’s mailroom, Davis knew it.
The political fight was already well under way behind the scenes. Davis and his colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee staff repeatedly contacted Katz and Banks, looking to solidify plans for their intended Monday hearing. But Katz and Banks continually pushed back, saying their client needed more time to prepare for such an appearance, given her distant location and the threats she was fielding as a result of her allegations against Kavanaugh.
“They were saying, ‘She’ll testify Monday,’” recalled Banks. “And we were saying, ‘Well, that’s ridiculous.’”
Then Edward Whelan, a friend of Kavanaugh’s and onetime clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia who was the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a prominent conservative research organization, stepped forward. Whelan published a series of tweets suggesting that Ford’s allegations amounted to a case of mistaken identity and that in fact it was Chris Garrett—known as “Squi” to Kavanaugh and his friends—who may have groped and silenced her in his Chevy Chase childhood home.
“Dr. Ford may well have been the victim of a severe sexual assault by someone 36 years ago,” Mr. Whelan wrote. “Her allegations are so vague as to such basic matters as when and where that it is impossible for Judge Kavanaugh to *prove* his innocence.”
Whelan pointed out that Garrett and Blasey had briefly dated before the alleged incident. Garrett’s home then was within walking distance of the Columbia Country Club, which put it in the right vicinity as the location for the events she had alleged. Whelan’s posts included photographs of Garrett, suggesting his appearance was similar to Kavanaugh’s.
The Whelan tweets quickly made Davis’s into a sideshow. Here, a powerful Washington lawyer had dragged a private citizen into the fray, seemingly without even a private warning. Political players were appalled; some cried conspiracy. Steve Schmidt, a longtime Republican strategist who had been critical of the Trump administration, called it “inconceivable” that the Whelan posts had been issued without the approval of White House and GOP officials. Reports soon surfaced that Whelan had met privately with Senator Orrin Hatch and that Hatch’s spokesperson, Matt Whitlock, had retweeted another Whelan tweet promoting a mistaken-identity theory, telling people to “keep an eye on Ed’s tweets the next few days.” (After Whelan’s thread came out, Whitlock deleted the tweet and denied having known what Whelan was planning.)
Ford was disturbed by the posts. She thought there was no chance the assault had occurred at Garrett’s house. Garrett, after all, had been her steady for a time preceding the alleged incident with Kavanaugh; she knew him, and she knew his house in Chevy Chase. Even after breaking up, Ford and Garrett had been friendly enough that when he landed in Sibley Memorial Hospital with a medical problem—she couldn’t remember what it was, though pictures from that time show Garrett with one arm in a sling and a band around his upper body—she had taken the bus there from school one afternoon to visit him. (Classmates from Georgetown Prep also faintly remembered Garrett’s injury and hospital stay.)
On Thursday evening, The Washington Post reported that the “mistaken identity” argument was a central plank of the planned Kavanaugh defense against the Ford allegations. Whether the plan was to suggest it was someone else or to point the finger at a specific person—as Whelan did—is unclear.
Whelan, who had served as a counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee and worked with Kavanaugh in the Bush White House, later apologized and deleted the posts, calling his behavior “an appalling and inexcusable mistake of judgment.” He subsequently took a leave of absence from work, but returned a month later. Garrett, a social studies teacher at a private school in Atlanta, remained publicly silent. Even friends from Prep would have trouble connecting with him.
On Friday, September 21, Trump weighed in again. “I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents,” the president said on Twitter. He also said Kavanaugh was “a fine man” who was “under assault by radical left wing politicians.”
This was crucial messaging for Kavanaugh, who knew how essential the president’s backing was.
That Friday morning, the Washington lawyer Michael Bromwich was in Chicago on a client matter when he heard from Ricki Seidman. Seidman, a bespectacled blond-haired strategist who worked at the public relations firm TSD Communications, had been involved with a slew of Supreme Court nomination battles, starting with Anita Hill’s. She had also helped run the “War Room” during Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign for president, setting election strategies for the notoriously undisciplined Arkansas governor.
In addition, Seidman had worked as the director of scheduling and advance in the Clinton White House; as deputy associate attorney general in the late 1990s, working on issues of school safety, civil rights, and other domestic policy matters; and as Joe Biden’s communications director during the 2008 presidential campaign, when he was Barack Obama’s running mate. She had also advised companies like Google, Bechtel, and Facebook.
Seidman had been introduced to Ford by Katz and met Ford over coffee in August in California. Like Katz and Ford’s other attorneys, Seidman was donating her time to help the professor, motivated by a sense of duty. With her call to Bromwich, she was asking another professional to do the same, this time because Ford needed a lawyer with more experience in handling congressional hearings.
Bromwich was also a D.C. insider and an ally of the Clinton and Obama administrations. A trim former prosecutor with a salt-and-pepper beard and a professorial mien, Bromwich had been the Justice Department’s inspector general during the Clinton administration and participated in many congressional hearings. He had also worked under Rudolph Giuliani in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan, represented the government in the Iran-Contra matter, and supervised an effort to overhaul the nation’s Minerals Management Service after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010. Bromwich had spent many years in private practice and was currently acting as a corporate monitor to Walmart and Apple.
He was up for advising Ford, too. “I live for interesting stuff,” he said in an interview later.
Bromwich and Seidman arranged for an introductory phone call to be held later on September 21, which Bromwich dialed into from Chicago’s Midway International Airport, where he was about to catch a flight back to Washington. Katz and Banks laid out the situation for him: Davis and his colleagues were insisting that Ford testify on Monday, which would give her little or no time to prepare. And Grassley was signaling that the offer was final.
“It was very intense,” remembered Bromwich. “They were getting a lot of pressure.”
The Ford team spoke to Davis again on Saturday, this time with Bromwich—who had been working out at a local Crunch Fitness when the call was arranged—dialing in from the gym’s spinning room. Both sides, which had been dueling in the media, felt irritated with the growing impasse.
Ford, her lawyers told Davis, was willing to testify publicly. But there were certain conditions that would have to be met in order to ensure her comfort level, which was already low. Among them: scheduling the hearing later than Monday, which had become a nonstarter for their client, and making sure that, if a date and open hearing could be agreed upon, Ford would be permitted to sit before the committee alongside her counsel, rather than at a table by herself, as was more customary.
Davis kept signaling that he was ready to walk away, as if Ford and her lawyers were simply too unreasonable to negotiate with. “I think their intelligence was, she wasn’t coming,” Katz later speculated of the Davis team in an interview. Because of that, much of the dialogue with the committee staff, she said, was “clarifying, saying, ‘She’s coming.’ We just wanted this to be fair.”
Up until the middle of that weekend, however, the Republicans threatened that it was Monday or nothing. Also, mindful of the optics, Grassley’s office wanted to hire an outside female prosecutor to interview Ford at the hearing instead of having the all-male panel of Republican senators do it themselves. And they wanted the prosecutor to have fifty uninterrupted minutes for questions, a condition that Feinstein’s staff would not allow. Instead, the ranking member wanted each side to have the same amount of time and to take turns. They were also furious that Davis wouldn’t give up the name of the prosecutor the Republicans planned to hire. The reality was, his team had been dialing madly around the country to find someone who was willing to do the job and only finalized their selection on Saturday.
Despite the rhetorical headbutting, Davis tried at times to reassure them that they would make Ford feel comfortable. “Senator Grassley is committed to providing a safe and respectful environment,” Davis said repeatedly, invoking his boss’s penchant for being the nice guy. (Indeed, Grassley found the mean-spirited partisanship infusing the process distasteful, and displayed a deference to Feinstein, his most senior counterpart on the committee, insisting that his staff refer to her as “the ranking member.”)
But Davis himself, a man known for cutting asides and gallows humor even among his friends, came off as aggressive. “Is this your final offer?” he would say when the Ford team talked through its conditions. The whole thing had the feel, at times, of a rancorous financial negotiation.
Still, by Saturday afternoon, they had the contours of a deal for Ford to testify the following Thursday. So shortly after two p.m., the attorneys wrote Davis an email, telling him that Ford was coming: “Dr. Ford accepts the committee’s request to provide her firsthand knowledge of Brett Kavanaugh’s sexual misconduct next week.”
Kathleen Charlton had roomed with Robin Pogrebin at Yale and graduated in 1987. By Monday, September 17, Charlton had learned that news outlets were pursuing the Ramirez story. The following Thursday, September 20, she called her friend and classmate David Todd, who told her that The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow had contacted him.
“Todd also shared the surprising news that Brett had called him,” Charlton said in a statement she ultimately submitted to the FBI. “He said that Brett was giving him a heads-up that press would likely make contact and wanted to make sure Dave would share ‘no bad.’ It seemed Dave understood this to mean he was not to speak ill of Brett’s history.”
Todd also told Charlton that he had responded to Farrow’s questions about the assault details by saying, “I definitely don’t remember that.”
Pogrebin, who was covering the Kavanaugh confirmation for The New York Times, learned about the conversation from another classmate. The next day, September 21, she called Todd to ask him about it. Charlton immediately received an angry text from Todd: “Don’t F****** TELL PEOPLE BRETT GOT IN TOUCH WITH ME!!! I TOLD YOU AT THE TIME THAT WAS IN CONFIDENCE!!!”
Charlton would later say publicly, “From the content and all-capital-letters of the text, Dave seemed to feel that there was a great deal at stake for Brett if Brett’s fears of exposure ever became public.”
On September 22, nearly a week after the Ford story surfaced, Leland Keyser, through her lawyer, gave a statement to the media and the Senate Judiciary Committee, saying she did not know Kavanaugh and had “no recollection of ever being at a party or gathering where he was present, with, or without, Dr. Ford.” The following day, Keyser told a Washington Post reporter in a brief interview at her home that while she didn’t recall the situation, she believed Ford’s allegations.
To Keyser, a petite blond woman with a blunt but friendly bearing, the Ford account was an unwelcome development. Keyser’s adult life had not been easy. After graduation, she had parlayed her athletic talent into a career in golf, playing professionally herself and then founding the women’s golf program as a Division I sport at Georgetown University. In 2005, she had led her team to a second-place finish at the Big East Women’s Golf Championship as its coach.
But since then, she had been derailed by a multitude of ailments, undergoing numerous back surgeries, a knee replacement, and other treatments, leaving her unable to work. A Mayo Clinic chronic-pain program helped, but she still had many bad days. She had lost a boyfriend after a diving accident—at the Columbia Country Club pool, of all places—in her early twenties and been divorced twice. Her Holton friends had often worried about her health and ability to cope.
Now reporters were camped out at Keyser’s Silver Spring home, watching what felt like her every move. She couldn’t sleep and was upset about her lack of privacy. To escape the attention, she checked into a hotel in Bethesda. But when even that didn’t calm her nerves, Keyser flew to Michigan to stay with a friend. She was eventually captured on film by Daily Mail reporters in a baseball cap and shorts, looking stressed and disheveled.
Kavanaugh spent hours holed up in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, preparing for his testimony with White House counsel Don McGahn; the former Fox News executive Bill Shine; Raj Shah, a White House spokesman; and Sarah Sanders, Trump’s chief spokeswoman. The president’s counselor and frequent public defender Kellyanne Conway was also involved.
During these practice sessions, or “moots,” Kavanaugh was questioned so intensely and continually on the Ford allegations that he grew angry. He marveled that, after twelve years on the federal bench, he was having to defend his sexual history rather than his deep legal record or even his thousands of pages of emails and other documents from his many public roles. A September 25 preparatory phone call with Grassley’s staff was just one in a series of indignities.
“Okay. So we’re on the same page,” a staffer said on the call, “I’m going to define ‘sexual or romantic behavior’ as kissing, touching, or penetrating her genitals, anus, or breasts; touching or penetrating your—her touching or penetrating your genitals or anus; seeing her genitals, anus, or breasts; or her seeing your genitals or anus.”
It was not the sort of job interview Kavanaugh ever imagined for himself.
To help his mentor deal with the onslaught, Travis Lenkner, a Chicago-based litigator who had clerked for Kavanaugh during his second year on the D.C. bench, flew to Washington to head up the judge’s support team. Lenkner weighed in on media appearances and organized the various efforts by friends and associates to back the judge, including letters of support from former classmates and interviews with Kavanaugh surrogates.
On September 25, Lenkner himself, a polished speaker with sandy blond hair, a polka-dot tie, and a poker face, appeared on PBS NewsHour to discuss Kavanaugh. Addressing the notion that Kavanaugh had assaulted Ford, Lenkner said Kavanaugh, like anyone, had moments from his youth that he’d look back on and “cringe” over. But those things, he added, are “far from what has been alleged here.”
“To say that someone drank beer in high school or in college,” Lenkner said, “is a far cry from saying that a sexual assault ever came close to occurring.”
In assisting Kavanaugh, Lenkner was aided by a handful of other former clerks, as was the practice with most Supreme Court nominees. Many came from Kavanaugh’s initial years on the bench, a time when a judge is learning the job and relationships with his or her clerks are often at their most intense. Now Kavanaugh’s inner circle of clerks included Zina Bash, who had gone on to work for Senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn before becoming a Trump administration aide; Porter Wilkinson, who was now the chief of staff to the board of regents at the Smithsonian Institution; and Roman Martinez, a partner in the firm Latham & Watkins’s appellate practice who had been an assistant in the Solicitor General’s Office, representing the federal government in litigation.
These former clerks shared an abiding loyalty to their former boss that was not unusual. But Kavanaugh’s particular attention to his past employees and quick recall of the details of their lives had cemented that rapport. While they worked for him, Kavanaugh engaged his clerks in rigorous debate before oral arguments, invited them to lunches to discuss their careers and families, and, with Ashley, hosted them at his Chevy Chase home for holiday dinners. Jennifer Mascott, who testified on Kavanaugh’s behalf during the first round of Senate hearings, noted that he had remained involved in developing her career at every stage in the eleven years since she’d left his chambers.
Now she and her former colleagues had a chance to repay Kavanaugh’s generosity. They went into high gear to defend their mentor. Davis, who was trying to maintain a distance from Kavanaugh himself, went to them when he wanted to share a message or relay an informal question. Davis made clear to the clerks that this was not a legal fight they were in. It was a political one.