Sometime between September 8 and 12, Ramirez’s mother, Mary Ann LeBlanc, was watching television during a visit to her daughter in Boulder, Colorado, when a report on Kavanaugh’s nomination came on the screen. Hearing his name, Ramirez peered over the railing from the upstairs level of her house and said out loud, “He drank a lot.”
It wasn’t until Monday, September 17, when Ramirez was sitting at her desk at work, that she discovered her personal relevance to Kavanaugh’s confirmation. She picked up a message on her office voicemail from New Yorker reporter Ronan Farrow, a name she did not know, given her limited media consumption. She also received a message on her cell phone from Beth Reinhard, a reporter at The Washington Post. When Ramirez stepped out and returned Farrow’s call, he told her he was looking into allegations of sexual misconduct against Kavanaugh at Yale.
“I actually said, ‘I don’t have any stories about Brett Kavanaugh and sexual misconduct,’” Ramirez recalled. Farrow told her he was trying to verify a story “about a night when someone exposed himself to you.”
Ramirez said, “Oh, that—that I remember clearly. I can’t talk about that right now; I’m at work.”
Ramirez had grown resigned to that experience the way she had many other painful encounters at Yale. People made fun of how she spoke, namely the way she dropped consonants from words like “mitten” and the name “Martin.” In Spanish class, classmates ribbed her for not being better with the language, since her last name is Ramirez. Some questioned whether she was re-wearing the same pair of jeans and called out her knockoff black-and-red Air Jordan sneakers.
“It was not about how I thought of me,” Ramirez said. “It was how they looked at me.”
Sometimes the insults were delivered as humorous asides that nevertheless proved hurtful, including comments like “My mom told me I could find one of you in my backyard.” Or when she’d go over to someone’s house: “Hide the knives.” Or questioning her admission to Yale on the merits: “How did you get in here? Is it because you’re Puerto Rican?”
“I never got it, but I knew it was about me being Puerto Rican,” Ramirez said. “I just knew it had to be a joke about me. It was all supposed to be funny and people trying to separate me from my Puerto Rican-ness, like, ‘I don’t think of you as Puerto Rican.’ What does that mean—because if you did, you would think less of me?”
Ramirez wasn’t new to prejudice. She’d had to argue her way into the honors class at her high school. Her mother worried that, at Yale, her daughter would feel inferior. But Ramirez was determined to press forward. “I was used to being underestimated,” she said. “I was used to people thinking, ‘How did she do that?’”
“My mom would have preferred me to go to a smaller college—looking back at it, she was right,” she said. At a place like Yale, “they invite you to the game, but they never show you the rules or where the equipment is.”
To some extent, Ramirez was experiencing the harsh reality that all Yale students face: “You think you’re badass in high school, then you go to Yale and you have to work your ass off just to be average,” said Andy Thurstone, a classmate. He added of Ramirez, “I think she was a little overwhelmed with that.”
Ramirez’s father, who is Puerto Rican, rose through the Southern New England Telephone Company, having started as a cable splicer. Her mother, who is French, was a medical technician. One of three children—her sister, Denise, is eighteen months younger, and her brother, Mark, seven and a half years younger—Ramirez took pride in her parents’ work ethic and enjoyed her childhood’s simple pleasures: swimming in their aboveground pool, taking camping trips, riding behind her father on his snowmobile.
She was a diligent, obedient student, becoming valedictorian at her Catholic elementary school, St. Lawrence, and excelling at her Catholic high school, St. Joseph. “She dedicated everything to school—she did not get in trouble, I don’t even think she dated,” recalled LeBlanc. “She just was determined to succeed, and she was going to go out and get it. And she did.” Ramirez worked summers serving ice cream at Carvel, driving there in the used car she’d bought with $500 of her babysitting earnings. Unable to afford full freight at Yale (nearly $13,000 at the time for tuition, room, and board; $72,100 in 2019), her parents had to take out loans. To chip in, Ramirez, who studied sociology and psychology, also obtained student loans and had work-study jobs on campus, including serving food in the dining halls and cleaning dorm rooms before class reunions.
She was a cheerleader her freshman year, sometimes positioned at the pinnacle of the pyramid, but learned quickly that although cheerleading was cool in high school, it didn’t carry the same cachet in college.
For Ramirez, Yale was full of painful ironies like that. People would call her Debbie Cheerleader or Debbie Dining Hall or start to say “Debbie does . . .” as a play on the 1978 porn movie Debbie Does Dallas. But Ramirez, who had limited sexual experience and knowledge, didn’t understand the reference.
“She was very innocent coming into college,” Liz Swisher, who roomed with Ramirez for three years at Yale and is now a Seattle physician, later recalled. “I felt an obligation early in freshman year to protect her.”
Over and over again, friends use the same words to describe Ramirez: guileless, sweet, shy, naive. They called her “the Debster.”
“While many of her friends at Yale were boisterous and border-line obnoxious, Debster was always slightly in the background, seemingly our shadow of good conscience,” said Ramirez’s close friend Tracy Harmon Joyce in a written statement. “Debster has integrity and character, and is honest to a fault.”
While Ramirez may have come into Yale with the determination to prove herself, her experiences there—most powerfully the Kavanaugh encounter—made her question whether she belonged. “I’ve never said anything good about Yale,” she said.
Still, she made some close friends, including Harmon, Swisher, Lynne Brookes, and Karen Yarasavage, a member of the Yale basketball team. Yarasavage, who did not respond to interview requests for this book, made Ramirez a bridesmaid in her wedding and the godmother of her youngest daughter.
At that Baltimore wedding, in 1997—when Ramirez was photographed in a group that included Kavanaugh—Kerry Berchem, a Yale schoolmate, noted that Ramirez stayed by her side, steering clear of her usual group. “I thought it was weird that she hung out with me so much,” Berchem, now a lawyer in private practice in New York, said later. “These are your friends; you hung out with them all the time in college. Why are you not hanging out with them now?”
After college, however, Ramirez began to cut ties with Yale altogether. Having sold accident and disability insurance and then worked as a medical sales rep, Ramirez in 2002 started volunteering with the Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence, or SPAN, a nonprofit organization that assists victims of domestic violence—including women who have been sexually assaulted. In 2004, she became a staff member there, working as a victim’s advocate coordinator and eventually joining the organization’s board, on which she continues to serve. While working there, Ramirez began to understand her identity as a person of color with light-skinned privilege.
It was this feeling of alienation that made Ramirez begin to distance herself from her past, leaving her Yale friends confused about why she had grown distant. “If I felt like a person in my life wasn’t going to embrace my journey or would somehow question it,” Ramirez said, “I just let them go.”
On the evening of September 17, once she had returned from the office, Ramirez called Farrow back and began a conversation that continued over that week. Talking to Farrow was cathartic, enabling Ramirez to finally be able to reckon with her Yale experience.
In debating whether to cooperate with the New Yorker story, Ramirez ultimately realized she had two choices: come forward and join Ford or stay silent. “Which one can I live with?” Ramirez said she asked herself. “I knew I couldn’t live with my own self-judgment and blame of knowing I did nothing at all.”
But while her initial motivation was to stand with another survivor, she ultimately realized she was also standing up for herself. “It wasn’t altruistic by the time it was done,” she said. “I was doing it for me, too.”
On September 18, Ramirez called to prepare her mother for what might be coming out in the media. LeBlanc recalled Ramirez telling her that “something happened at Yale” all those years ago. Since coming forward now was not initially Ramirez’s idea, LeBlanc was later “upset that anybody thought she started this story.”
Rumors of the Ramirez account, circulating in Washington, made their way to Colorado senator Michael F. Bennet. Bennet, in turn, suggested that the attorney Stan Garnett—who had served for nearly ten years as the district attorney for Boulder County—reach out to Ramirez, which he did.
Ramirez knew Garnett from her work at SPAN, one of the two major domestic violence safe houses in Boulder County with which Garnett worked closely as district attorney. On September 18, she hired Garnett to represent her. An imposing man—one part politician, one part cowboy—Garnett had been the Democratic nominee for Colorado attorney general in 2010. He had recently rejoined the law firm of Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck.
“I told Debbie, ‘Your obligation is only one thing: to tell the truth,’” Garnett said. “Your obligation is not to figure out whether it impacts Brett Kavanaugh’s ability to be on the Supreme Court. I will help make sure that you are protected as you go through the process.”
Protecting Ramirez meant connecting her with a communications strategist and helping evaluate her security needs, given the death threats experienced by Ford. Garnett had a security consultant come to Ramirez’s house, who warned Ramirez that members of the media might pay neighbors to let them peer into her windows and that drones might be launched around the perimeter of her property. Garnett also contacted the Boulder police chief and the Boulder sheriff, both of whom he knew well. He encouraged Ramirez to shut down her internet presence and to make sure her phone number was unpublished.
On September 21, Garnett invited John Clune onto Ramirez’s legal team. Clune, who looks more like a laid-back ski instructor than a hard-driving criminal lawyer, started his career as a prosecutor—serving as chief deputy district attorney for Eagle County. He had come to specialize in representing survivors of sexual abuse and was known for his sensitive work with victims. In 2007, he started the Boulder law firm Victim Justice Initiative, developing a national practice representing targets of sexual assault and other violent crimes. In 2009 he cofounded the Rocky Mountain Victim Law Center, and in 2013 he joined Hutchinson, Black and Cook, a Boulder-based firm, where he now focuses on representing students and families on campus rape and Title IX matters.
Ramirez contacted Swisher, Harmon Joyce, and her sister, Denise, asking if she’d ever told them about her experience with Kavanaugh. She also reached out to James Roche, Kavanaugh’s freshman-year roommate and a close friend of Ramirez. Roche, now the CEO of a San Francisco software company, had only a vague recollection of hearing about the Ramirez incident, but he also told The New Yorker, “I cannot imagine her making this up,” adding that he remembered Kavanaugh as “frequently, incoherently drunk.”
“Is it believable that she was alone with a wolfy group of guys who thought it was funny to sexually torment a girl like Debbie?” Roche added. “Yeah, definitely. Is it believable that Kavanaugh was one of them? Yes.”
Ramirez’s efforts to backstop her memories with friends would later be used against her; Republicans suggested that she was trying to construct a story rather than confirm one. But her lawyers quickly understood that this type of deliberative behavior was typical of Ramirez: while she was ultimately confident of her memories, she wanted to double-check them.
Ramirez decided it was important to let Farrow use her name, that her allegations would have less credibility and force if they were anonymous. “With all my work with survivors, I knew, ‘I have to use my name,’” she said. “My story is not the same if I don’t use my name.” She would not, however, allow Farrow to use the names of her friends; she wanted to protect them, in particular Yarasavage and her three daughters.
“That was one of my biggest struggles,” she said, adding of Yarasavage, “I loved her. I still love her. She asked me to be the godmother of her daughter, and now their father was in the room and this is going to impact them.”
That loyalty wasn’t reciprocated by Yarasavage—or a number of others. Ironically, in finally coming to terms with her feelings of alienation from her alma mater, Ramirez set herself even further apart, at least from a certain crowd. Dave Todd, Dave White, Karen Yarasavage—along with fellow classmates Dan Murphy, Dino Ewing, and Louisa Garry—gave The New Yorker a statement in response to Ramirez’s allegations, describing themselves as “the people closest to Brett Kavanaugh during his first year at Yale.”
“He was a roommate to some of us, and we spent a great deal of time with him, including in the dorm where this incident allegedly took place,” the statement said. “Some of us were also friends with Debbie Ramirez during and after her time at Yale. We can say with confidence that if the incident Debbie alleges ever occurred, we would have seen or heard about it—and we did not.
“The behavior she describes would be completely out of character for Brett,” they continued. “In addition, some of us knew Debbie long after Yale, and she never described this incident until Brett’s Supreme Court nomination was pending. Editors from The New Yorker contacted some of us because we are the people who would know the truth, and we told them that we never saw or heard about this.”
Right before the New Yorker article posted, Farrow called Ramirez to tell her about that statement. To her, it was like a sock to the stomach. “At that time, I looked at it as: they signed a statement against me,” she said. “I felt so betrayed and hurt, it was like being in the room again. They signed a statement to lock it in the room.”
Garry and Ewing later asked that their names be removed, saying they “did not wish to dispute Ramirez’s claims.” Garry, now a high school teacher and coach, had testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Kavanaugh’s behalf on September 7, describing how she had met Kavanaugh on the first day of college, run marathons with him over the years, and brought her students to his courthouse for a field trip.
As the New Yorker piece was being finalized, Ramirez had trouble sleeping. She would nod off from exhaustion but then wake up with her mind racing. So when the magazine’s photographer for the story, Benjamin Rasmussen, told her the dawn light at 6:30 a.m. would be best for a portrait, Ramirez had no problem agreeing to that early hour. Before taking the picture, in a park near her house, Ramirez thought carefully about what to wear. “I wanted to present all of me,” she said.
She ended up choosing a shirt that read PUERTO RICO; an Indian shawl from her husband Vikram Shah’s family, “so Vikram was wrapped around me”; and jeans, because they reflected her understated lifestyle. Shah held the light screen, and as Ramirez looked at him with tears in her eyes, she thought, “I’m sorry I put you through this.”
John Clune was supposed to fly out to Montana for a child sexual abuse case on the morning of Sunday, September 23, but he got up extra early to stop at Ramirez’s home on his way to the airport. The disjointed quality of Ramirez’s story was consistent with those of many victims Clune had dealt with in his career: they have a sharp memory of certain details, a fuzzy recollection of others.
“If somebody is going to make something up, they don’t make something up with all these holes in the story,” Clune said. “Your memory is not bad if you’re not restricted by the truth.”
Clune recognized that the incident Ramirez described was not akin to rape; but it still registered with him as aggressive, humiliating, and wrong. “This was deliberate hazing that was done to try to make fun of her and get a laugh at her expense, and to do that in a sexual way that’s creating a hostile environment,” he said. “That’s the kind of thing that sets the table for sexual violence.”
“She was targeted,” he added. “She’s the quiet, shy person who was there, and it was funny for them to get her drunk and it was funny for Brett to do this. Somebody gets a laugh at the expense of someone who is probably the most vulnerable of the group.”
The New Yorker story posted that evening. “After six days of carefully assessing her memories and consulting with her attorney, Ramirez said that she felt confident enough of her recollections to say that she remembers Kavanaugh had exposed himself at a drunken dormitory party, thrust his penis in her face, and caused her to touch it without her consent as she pushed him away,” the story said. “Ramirez is now calling for the F.B.I. to investigate Kavanaugh’s role in the incident.”
The article included an anonymous quote from Yarasavage, stating, “This is a woman I was best friends with. We shared intimate details of our lives. And I was never told this story by her, or by anyone else. It never came up. I didn’t see it; I never heard of it happening.”
The story included a statement from Kavanaugh denying the allegations: “This alleged event from 35 years ago did not happen. The people who knew me then know that this did not happen, and have said so. This is a smear, plain and simple. I look forward to testifying on Thursday about the truth, and defending my good name—and the reputation for character and integrity I have spent a lifetime building—against these last-minute allegations.”
The White House also provided The New Yorker with a statement. “This 35-year-old, uncorroborated claim is the latest in a coordinated smear campaign by the Democrats designed to tear down a good man,” said White House spokeswoman Kerri Kupec. “This claim is denied by all who were said to be present and is wholly inconsistent with what many women and men who knew Judge Kavanaugh at the time in college say. The White House stands firmly behind Judge Kavanaugh.”
On September 23, Ramirez placed a NO TRESPASSING sign on her garage, alongside another sign on her garbage can that said I HAVE NO COMMENT and that referred reporters to Garnett, with his phone numbers. The Washington Times then published an article with a photo of that sign and a headline suggesting that Ramirez was refusing to talk to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Directing people to Garnett spared Ramirez some of the ugliness that was coming her way. But instead Garnett started getting death threats, so the sign on her garbage can was replaced with another one: PLEASE DEMAND AN FBI INVESTIGATION FOR DR. CHRISTINE FORD AND DEBBIE RAMIREZ’S CLAIMS.
“For a few days there, it was just incredible—I had people sending bizarre and foul and pornographic emails—there was a drone clearly over my house,” Garnett said. “There were reporters over at my house.
“By the time the story broke, most of the craziness was directed at me and John,” he added, “because we were the people who could be found publicly.”
The Republicans had to get a handle on events that were spiraling out of control. Though the Ramirez story was not as damning as Ford’s—and potentially muddied Ford’s clarion account—the allegations nevertheless fed a troubling narrative and threatened to derail, or at least delay, Kavanaugh’s confirmation. At 7:43 p.m. on September 23, just hours after the New Yorker story posted online, Mike Davis decided to be proactive, emailing Garnett to ask when Ramirez would be available for an interview with Senate Judiciary Committee investigators. He added that Grassley’s staff had only learned of these allegations from the New Yorker article.
“Democratic staff should have made Republican staff aware of these allegations to fully probe them rather than drop an eleventh-hour allegation at the tail-end of the confirmation process,” Davis wrote. “But we are determined to take Ms. Ramirez’s statement and investigate further as necessary as quickly as possible.”
Garnett responded that he would get back to Davis, which Clune did the following afternoon, emailing that Ramirez “would welcome an investigation by the FBI into this information and would cooperate with such. On appropriate terms, she would also agree to be interviewed in person.”
After seeing the New Yorker story, Bill Pittard, a lawyer at the D.C. firm KaiserDillon, which specializes in white-collar defense, did something he’d never done before: emailed a lawyer he hadn’t met to offer his assistance. Pittard, who had previously served as the acting general counsel and deputy general counsel for the U.S. House of Representatives, specializes in helping officials of the legislative branch or clients preparing for congressional hearings.
“I emailed Stan on Monday morning to say, ‘Looks like an interesting matter,’” Pittard recalled. “‘If you need any help with the congressional piece—which seems likely to come now that this allegation is out there—feel free to let me know.’”
Pittard was brought on board the following day, September 25 (all of Ramirez’s attorneys worked pro bono, with the hope that perhaps outside contributions might compensate them down the road). He then communicated to the Judiciary Committee that Ramirez hoped to see an FBI investigation into her allegations and would agree to testify. “I thought there was no way the world would move forward without hearing from Debbie,” Pittard said.
The New York Times had also been tracking the Ramirez story over the past several days and ultimately made the difficult decision to hold off on publishing her allegations in the absence of corroboration. “Neither The New Yorker nor The New York Times, which attempted to verify Ms. Ramirez’s story last week, were able to find witnesses acknowledging the episode,” the Times wrote on September 25, adding that it had not obtained an interview with Ramirez.
The Times’s decision not to go with the Ramirez story—the paper instead followed up with a profile of her and Kavanaugh at Yale—quickly became ammunition for those who questioned Ramirez’s veracity or sought to discredit her account.
On September 25, in a phone interview with Senate Judiciary Committee staffers about the Ramirez allegations, Kavanaugh—in addition to reiterating his denial of the events—cited the Times’s decision not to publish. “The New York Times says as recently as last week, she was calling around to other classmates saying she wasn’t sure I had done this. And you know, I think—I think we’re—this is an outrage for this kind of thin, uncorroborated, thirty-five-year-old accusation to be leveled in this fashion at this time.
“After all these years, with all this time, and all these descriptions with no corroboration and with her best friend saying she never heard about it, you know, I’m—I’m really just, you know, stunned,” Kavanaugh added. “And outraged. It’s the twilight zone.”
Though the Times and The Washington Post both decided against publishing stories, various media outlets picked up on it nonetheless, giving the allegations weight as confirming a pattern in Kavanaugh’s behavior.
That weight threatened to grow even heavier two days later when, on September 25, a Washington-area woman named Julie Swetnick came forward with her own alarming accusations. Swetnick, who had graduated from a Montgomery County public high school three years before Kavanaugh left Georgetown Prep, posted a statement on Twitter through her lawyer, Michael Avenatti. She said that she had observed Kavanaugh as a high school student at parties where women were plied with alcohol or drugs and “gang raped” by “trains” of boys—including Kavanaugh and Judge—who lined up outside of bedrooms. She said that she had been raped by multiple boys as well, at a party where Kavanaugh and Judge had both been present, and she believed she had been drugged with quaaludes or another substance.
These deeply troubling charges were ambiguous in critical respects. Swetnick stated plainly in an affidavit that she had been raped and likely drugged by boys at a 1982 party. But she didn’t link Kavanaugh and Judge to the rape, other than to say they had attended the party where it occurred. She said Kavanaugh and Judge had “spiked” punch at the parties and “targeted” girls “so they could be taken advantage of” and even “gang raped.” She said she had seen both boys “lined up outside rooms” awaiting their “turn” with a girl inside. But she lacked specifics on dates, locations, and the girls who were involved.
Kavanaugh denied the charges. He told committee investigators that Swetnick’s claims amounted to “an outrageous accusation” whose details he found “ridiculous.” Judge also denied the claims. Many Georgetown Prep alumni, even those who thought the Ford account rang true, were also dubious. They said they had rarely, if ever, socialized with girls from Swetnick’s high school, Gaithersburg, making it improbable that she had attended “well over ten” house parties in the early 1980s alongside Kavanaugh and Judge. Moreover, the idea that those boys—or any of their classmates—would have gang-raped girls on a regular basis was out of step with the sort of sexual behaviors they remembered.
“We could all be obnoxious when we got drunk, and those guys are no exception,” said Joe Conaghan, a classmate from Georgetown Prep, speaking of Kavanaugh and Judge. “Obnoxious, yes. Drunk, yes. But rapists? No way.”
Grassley’s vetting squad—the Davis team—did not get much information out of Avenatti, who refused to make Swetnick available for questioning.
At the same time, Davis considered the pile-on of allegations a gift—the more extreme, numerous, and unsubstantiated the accusation, the more absurd they were bound to seem to any thoughtful person. Had the Democrats focused only on Ford, his reasoning went, her account could have succeeded in derailing Kavanaugh.
Ford’s credibility and the damning nature of her allegations were convincing even to some Republicans. Where Swetnick’s scenario lacked probability, Ford’s involved a likely group of friends in a conceivable location and time period. But the Democrats pounced on all of the charges being leveled against Kavanaugh, which now seemed to be barreling out of nowhere, blurring into what Republicans could easily assert was a political vendetta.
Avenatti was a huge help in that regard—“manna from heaven,” as Davis would say to colleagues. A brash Los Angeles lawyer who had represented the adult-film star Stormy Daniels in her claims against Trump—with whom she claimed to have had an affair that Trump then paid her to keep quiet—Avenatti was an especially polarizing figure. A slender hobbyist race-car driver with closely cropped hair and a confrontational glare, he had become a fixture on television news during the Daniels suit, which had been filed in March 2018. His combative talk toward the president had incensed the right.
But even though many pro-Kavanaugh Republicans felt Ramirez’s uncorroborated memory would likely help their claims of overreach, they were not eager to have Ramirez testify. There was serious concern that Ramirez’s story could add credence to Ford’s, and would further slow Kavanaugh’s confirmation. So instead, Grassley’s team engaged in a protracted back-and-forth with Ramirez’s lawyers over next steps.
The committee required some evidence of Ramirez’s allegations before speaking to her, including a sworn statement from her or a phone call with investigators. “You can’t get a congressional investigation opened by making an allegation without any evidence,” one GOP aide said in an interview. But Ramirez’s lawyers said they needed to speak with the committee before making their client available.
On Tuesday, September 25, Heather Sawyer, Davis’s Democratic counterpart on the Judiciary Committee, sent Davis an exasperated email. “The Committee does not usually refuse to talk with counsel (or whistleblowers), and also does not usually place preconditions on getting on the phone to discuss next steps, so I’m not sure why that is happening here,” she said, adding, “I’ve never encountered an instance where the Committee has refused even to speak with an individual or counsel. I am perplexed as to why this is happening here, except that it seems designed to ensure that the Majority can falsely claim that Ms. Ramirez and her lawyers refused to cooperate.”
Davis fired back: “I have not refused to speak with anyone. I am simply requesting—for the 7th time now over the last 48 hours—that Ms. Ramirez’s attorneys provide the Senate Judiciary Committee with any evidence that they have before we move to the next steps.”
Grassley rejected a September 23 request from Feinstein for a postponement of nomination proceedings to permit investigation of Kavanaugh’s conduct with respect to Ramirez. Grassley said he was “unclear why Ms. Ramirez’s claims should have any bearing on Dr. Ford’s testimony.”
Like Garnett, Clune was mainly focused on getting Ramirez’s recollections into the hands of the decision makers. “The sense was, our job wasn’t to convince anybody what happened,” he said. “Our job was to get the information that Debbie had to whoever was going to be doing the background investigation on Kavanaugh.”
Once her story was out, Ramirez hunkered down at home, grateful for the food, cards, and visits from friends. She particularly appreciated the support from her husband, Shah, a technology consultant. They had met in 2004 through a mutual friend, and Shah was immediately struck by Ramirez’s combination of tenderness and tenacity. “She was gentle,” he said, “but she was very strong and determined.”
Reading the article was its own new reality. Ramirez had not thought of what happened to her as sexual misconduct until she saw it described that way in The New Yorker. “It took 35 years later to read it in print to see it in those words,” she said.
The supportive letters, emails, and texts from perfect strangers that poured in after the article’s publication were overwhelming and affirming. She read every one and sometimes turned to them during the confirmation hearings for sustenance. “I would save it for a moment when I needed to read it,” she said. During an interview, Ramirez pulled out a thick binder containing some of the letters that she’d saved in plastic sheaths, as well as a decorative box filled with other letters, still in their envelopes.
She read from a few of them, messages like “We’re with you, we believe you, you are changing the world,” and “Your courage and strength has inspired me. The bravery has been contagious.”
College students wrote about how Ramirez had helped them find the words to speak for the first time about their own experiences of sexual violence. Medical students wrote about how they were now going to listen differently to victims. Parents wrote about having conversations with their kids about how bad behavior can follow them through life. One father told Ramirez he was talking to his two sons about how their generation has the opportunity and obligation to be better. SPAN received donations in her honor.
Strangers also came up to Ramirez in public, thanking her—often through tears—sometimes asking if they could give her a hug.
At the same time, the very Yale community from which Ramirez had come to feel detached circled around her. More than three thousand Yale women signed an open letter commending Ramirez’s “courage in coming forward” and urging delay of the vote on Kavanaugh until “all witnesses have testified under oath.”
“We demand that her allegations be thoroughly investigated and that she be treated with fairness, and given an opportunity to tell her story,” the letter said.
Rebecca Steinitz, a Yale College 1986 graduate, along with Kate Manning, from the class of 1979, and Christina Baker Kline, from the class of 1986, drafted the letter—which also supported Ford—on Sunday, September 23, upon learning of Ramirez’s allegations in The New Yorker. The alumnae were careful not to say “we believe them,” but instead to convey that the charges should be taken seriously.
“White men of privilege have gotten away with an enormous amount in the centuries of our country’s history, and as a white woman with nearly as much privilege, I feel like it is my duty to speak up,” Steinitz said in an interview. “It’s my ethical obligation. I come from the seat of power and I have to speak to its abuses.”
More than fifteen hundred Yale men issued a similar letter two days later, on September 25.
“The harrowing accounts we’ve recently heard—of harassment, misconduct and assault—are sadly consistent with the campus culture at the time,” the letter said. “We can’t change what happened then, but we can speak out today: no one should be subjected to the abhorrent treatment Deborah and Dr. Blasey have described. Nobody who would do such things should be confirmed as a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.”