Keith Koegler had never met some of the people who gathered at his Cape Cod–style house, not far from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s, before sunrise on Tuesday, September 25. Given the early hour, nobody was much in the mood for long introductions. But they all had one thing in common—Ford—and had assembled for a trip to Washington, D.C., to support their friend when she testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
There was Kirsten Leimroth, whose children had attended the same kindergartens and junior lifeguard camps as Ford’s and who had become a crucial confidante on the beaches of Santa Cruz that previous summer. There was Chris Conroy, a photographer friend whose wife, Tanya, was one of Ford’s closest confidantes. There was Jay Backstrand, a private wealth manager and fellow sports dad, who had offered to do whatever he could to support Ford in the wake of her Kavanaugh disclosures. And there were two colleagues from Stanford who had been supportive throughout Ford’s attempts to speak up and share her memories.
As they assembled under an overcast sky, the friends tried to keep the conversation light, chatting about their jobs and their children’s activities. Before long, a couple of cars pulled up to whisk them north to a private airport hangar in Oakland. Ford, who had left Russell at home to take care of their children, had been driven separately in a secure vehicle and met them there.
She had handpicked the group for their emotional stoicism and clear-eyed counsel—taking into account their availability amid childcare responsibilities and demanding careers. She called them her “support team.”
Koegler, the baseball dad, was central to the network. In the months since Ford had first shared her recollection that Kavanaugh was the teenager who assaulted her back in the 1980s, Koegler had become not just a personal ballast, but her researcher in chief.
A tech industry lawyer, Koegler was a voracious reader and a technical thinker. In his second-floor home office, he’d spent many hours that summer poring over news coverage of the nomination process, biographical information about Kavanaugh, and writings and videos produced by Mark Judge. In combing through YouTube, articles, and social networks, Koegler had learned more about the house parties at Don Urgo’s and the lexicon of 1980s Georgetown Prep than he had ever thought he would care to know.
On September 24, Koegler had also signed an affidavit attesting to Ford’s 2016 description of her assault as well as her identification of Kavanaugh as her assailant, two years later.
“In all of my dealings with Christine I have known her to be a serious and honorable person,” he stated, just above his ballpoint signature. Ford’s husband, Russell, along with her close friends Adela Gildo-Mazzon and Rebecca White, also attested to having been informed—years or months ahead of Kavanaugh’s nomination—of Ford’s memories of being sexually assaulted by a now prominent judge.
Koegler and his wife, Elizabeth Hewitt, whom he had met at Vanderbilt Law School, in Nashville, Tennessee, had spent many hours with Christine and Russell that summer before any hearings, studying the options for disclosing Christine’s recollections to the chief decision makers in Washington without risking Ford’s privacy or personal safety. They often sat on a slouchy sofa on the Koegler family’s back porch while their kids hung out inside or played video games in the garage. Ford was not generally prone to taking direction from others, but in this case she sought ideas and feedback, much as she would in analyzing a set of data in her Stanford research studies.
At some point in August, Koegler strongly expressed his concern about her coming forward.
“I just worry it’s going to rip you apart,” he said.
As Christine’s friends gathered at Koegler’s house on the morning of Tuesday, the 25th, they had no idea what to expect of the next few days. It was still unclear whether she would testify publicly, given that Ford herself was somewhat imprecise about the purpose of the trip. She told friends she was simply traveling to Washington to meet with her lawyers and members of the Judiciary Committee in person.
Those well acquainted with Ford’s personality—always private, typically measured—thought it was possible that she hadn’t processed having already made the commitment to testify in public. In discussions with her that morning and in recent days, they’d had the impression that the talks about her appearance were still fluid, despite the widespread expectation of a televised public hearing. Ford seemed committed to share her recollections somehow in D.C., but how, exactly, that would unfold remained unclear to her friends. No matter what, they knew it would be hard for Ford, who didn’t relish revisiting a traumatic story in front of millions, let alone flying across the country in order to do it. Because of that, her friends focused on trying to keep Ford feeling calm and thinking positive.
“She didn’t need someone who would be high emotional drama,” recalled Leimroth, a tall accountant and mother of four. “I’ve been told I’m Germanic, for better or worse, so I’m not up-and-down,” she added of her personality. “And I was able to go.”
Ford and her supporters were flying on a private plane that had been secured through colleagues of hers as a way to simplify the travel and avoid public attention. The plane belonged to two Silicon Valley billionaires: Mark Pincus, who had founded the gaming company Zynga; and Reid Hoffman, cofounder of the professional-networking site LinkedIn. In the run-up to Ford’s testimony, Ford’s contacts had canvassed a small group of wealthy local residents to see if they would be willing to provide transportation. Pincus and Hoffman, who co-owned a plane and recognized the personal risks that Ford was taking, quickly agreed to cover the flight.
The two men were good friends and generous donors to Democratic causes. In addition to supporting scores of congressional candidates over the prior decade, Pincus and Hoffman had contributed to the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. During the Obama administration, they’d had repeated contact with Obama and his team, sometimes advising on social media strategy.
Hoffman said later that he and Pincus were motivated by the simple desire to help Ford: “We believed then, as we do now, that it is important to take seriously accusations of violence against women.” They wanted Ford to have a chance to air her information.
But they also knew well how radioactive the situation had become, given that their own pilots had been anxious to interact with Ford and her friends for fear of being identified and harassed by Ford’s detractors later. To assuage the pilot’s concerns, the billionaires hired a flight attendant to work the trip.
Buckling her seat belt, Ford was palpably nervous, given her long-standing fear of planes and other confined spaces. “I’m not going in front of the Judiciary Committee,” she repeatedly told her friends. “I’m just meeting with people individually.”
Jay Backstrand, the private wealth manager, attempted some humor. “Can I have a Bloody Mary?” he asked the flight attendant. But there was no alcohol available on board, only breakfast.
The plane landed at Dulles International Airport around 2:30 in the afternoon, earlier than expected. That meant Ford, already leery of being spotted (concealing her face in a baseball cap and sunglasses), had to linger in the private-plane hangar until the group’s ride arrived. Eventually she and her friends were picked up by a security team in black SUVs.
They were driven to the Watergate Hotel, where they compared notes about whose room had a view of the site of the infamous 1972 break-in. In a small conference room off the hotel’s main lobby, guarded by a hulking pair of security guards who had been hired to protect her while traveling, Ford met with her lawyers. In addition to Katz and Banks, that legal team now included Bromwich, who had joined just days before to aid with the congressional testimony, and Larry Robbins, the Washington litigator who had been one of the first to connect with Ford.
The group tried to put Ford at ease with small talk. Since she seemed emotionally drained, they kept the meeting short.
Given the ongoing discussions with Mike Davis and others on the majority staff, the lawyers understood Ford’s uncertainty about whether she would meet with senators individually in a closed setting or testify to the full committee in public. “There was always the question of open or closed hearing,” Banks said later, adding of Ford that “the committee had given her the option, so that had been a conversation throughout, about what was the better way to do that for her.”
For Banks and her colleagues, who had been immersed in advising Ford during the week before the Watergate meeting, the public glare had also been intense. They, too, had received death threats in the wake of the Washington Post story, some of them misogynistic, detailed, and disturbing. Some of those directed at Katz were also anti-Semitic, she said; some had sexually violent language. “It was scary,” she said. Like Ford, the lawyers quickly retained bodyguards who monitored them day and night.
In Chevy Chase, Maryland, Kavanaugh spent the days before the hearings impatient to rebut the story. It had been two weeks since the first whiff of charges against him surfaced, threatening not only his nomination but his reputation, and he was eager to speak out. Issuing prepared statements felt inadequate; he’d put out two—one on September 14, “categorically” denying the allegations, and another on September 20, calling for “a hearing as soon as possible, so that I can clear my name.” But he had not yet had an opportunity to publicly defend himself.
Instead, Kavanaugh had been forced to sit tight—deferring to the decisions of those shepherding his nomination, unable to do anything except watch as the allegations mushroomed and the news frenzy intensified. In just the past few days, the incendiary charges from Ramirez and Swetnick had been added to the mix. The Ford hearing was delayed, providing more time for Kavanaugh’s political opponents to dig into his past and feed embarrassing tidbits to the media about his youthful antics. Demonstrators wearing pins that read I BELIEVE CHRISTINE FORD were being hauled away from the Capitol in handcuffs for protesting his nomination.
Not long before, Kavanaugh had been on the verge of achieving his ultimate goal. Now he found himself fielding coarse questions about genital penetration and fending off accusations of gang rape. It was a surreal and agonizing moment.
Though Trump had recently stood in the East Room and introduced Kavanaugh in glowing terms, now reports swirled about whether the president’s support might be wavering. It looked very possible that the White House could decide Kavanaugh wasn’t worth the Herculean push and withdraw its nomination, particularly given the time pressure of confirming a new justice before the new Supreme Court term in October and the midterm elections in November. Trump was unpredictable, after all—as likely to redouble his support of the embattled nominee as to abandon him—so Kavanaugh’s confirmation seemed suddenly, dramatically uncertain.
But Trump, it turned out, wasn’t going to ditch his nominee without a fight. If the president’s team had heretofore delegated the housework to Grassley’s crew, now it kicked into high gear to prepare for a likely second round of hearings. Starting on September 18, Don McGahn, White House counsel, along with Shine, Sanders, and one of her senior press aides, summoned Kavanaugh to the White House for three straight days of interrogation about his sexual past.
That Thursday, September 20, a group of Democratic senators sent a letter to the White House arguing that its refusal to request an FBI investigation “abandons the precedent that President George H. W. Bush set when he asked the FBI to investigate after Anita Hill raised allegations against Judge Clarence Thomas in 1991.” And an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll conducted between September 16 and 19 found that 38 percent of registered voters, a majority of the group, now opposed Kavanaugh’s nomination. (Thirty-four percent were in favor.)
Around this time, Kavanaugh’s wife, Ashley, received death threats that had to be investigated by the U.S. Marshals Service: “May you, your husband and your kids burn in hell,” said one. “My condolences to you for being married to a rapist. Although you probably deserve it,” said another. It was a stunning dose of the same toxic rhetoric that had been heaped on Ford and her family, emblematic of the national outrage over her accusations, though from a very different direction. Kavanaugh moved his family out of the house temporarily, though he stayed behind.
Deeply frustrated by a sense of impotence, Kavanaugh did what he could behind the scenes. He worked with Beth Wilkinson—the lawyer whom Mike Davis had told he was “pumped” about Kavanaugh’s nomination—and Alexandra Walsh, experienced Washington trial attorneys. He consulted with Lenkner and his other close former clerks on communications and tactics. He and his wife tried to explain to their girls—in as much detail as each daughter could handle at her age—the maelstrom suddenly enveloping them. Kavanaugh had been just four years older than Margaret when the incident with Ford was alleged to have occurred—an age at which any associated legal records would likely have been sealed away to avoid damaging his reputation as an adult. He would later testify that talking to their daughters about Ford’s allegations may have been the worst experience of his and Ashley’s lives.
Finally, on September 24, the day before Ford and her friends flew east, Kavanaugh got the chance to say his piece. He and Ashley sat down with the Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum for an expansive conversation about the Ford, Ramirez, and Swetnick allegations. Grassley’s team thought the Kavanaughs should do the interview at home, so they would look relaxed in their own surroundings. But the couple was concerned about the disruption a network camera crew would cause—not only to their girls but also to their neighborhood, which was already dealing with a sizable media presence. So the interview was conducted in a suite at the Madison Hotel, in downtown Washington, just a ten-minute walk from the White House.
Sitting stiffly on banquet chairs, with a conventional vase of pink and white roses in the background that looked like it had come from 1-800-Flowers, Kavanaugh repeatedly denied Ford’s account, saying he couldn’t recall ever meeting her, let alone having sexual contact with her, consensual or otherwise.
“I’ve never sexually assaulted anyone,” he said time and again. He looked steadily at the interviewer, his voice focused and calm. He often repeated himself, as if sticking closely to rehearsed talking points.
Asked whether she had confronted her husband on the claims, his wife appeared to be fighting back tears. “No,” Ashley said, shaking her head, her smile rueful, her hands clasped in her lap. “I mean, I know Brett. I’ve known him for seventeen years. And this is not, at all, character—” she said, pausing to change course.
“It’s really hard to believe,” she continued. “He’s decent, he’s kind, he’s good. I know his heart. This is not consistent with Brett.”
MacCallum asked about the Ramirez allegations, which had only just been published in The New Yorker.
“I never did any such thing,” said Kavanaugh evenly. “If such a thing had happened, it would have been the talk of campus.” He cited reports, published in The New York Times and elsewhere, that Ramirez had been calling around to see if classmates shared her memories—evidence, he suggested, of their flimsiness. “I’m just asking for a fair process,” he said, over and over, using the phrase no fewer than eleven times.
Faced with one sordid accusation after another—did he flash his penis at Ramirez and laugh about it? Had he ever participated in a gang rape?—Kavanaugh remained composed throughout, his only tell being knitted brows and a modestly raised voice when asked about Swetnick’s claims that he and Mark Judge had spiked punch bowls at high school parties to facilitate “trains” of boys queueing up to have their way with girls. “That’s totally false and outrageous,” he said. “Never done any such thing.”
The interview was astounding by any measure. Not only had Kavanaugh been faced with allegations of misconduct toward women, which dwarfed those of Clarence Thomas so many years before, but he was volunteering details of his own sexual experience that were unheard of for someone in his position.
“I did not have sexual intercourse, or anything close to sexual intercourse, in high school, or for many years thereafter,” he said at one point, in an effort to debunk depictions of him as a sexual predator.
MacCallum had to make sure she’d heard right: a federal judge en route to the U.S. Supreme Court had just admitted on national television that he remained a virgin through college.
MS. MACCALLUM: So you’re saying that through all these years that are in question, you were a virgin?
JUDGE KAVANAUGH: That’s correct.
MS. MACCALLUM: Never had sexual intercourse with anyone in high school?
JUDGE KAVANAUGH: Correct.
MS. MACCALLUM: And through what years in college, since we’re probing into your personal life here?
JUDGE KAVANAUGH: Many years after. I’ll leave it at that.
MacCallum also seemed to try to startle the judge, to get him off his preconceived script, by asking him to speculate on why these assertions were being made. But Kavanaugh did not break his composure, saying only in measured tones, “I’m not going to let false accusations drive me out of this process.”
Toward the end of the interview, when MacCallum questioned whether Kavanaugh thought he still had the president behind him, the judge said Trump had called that afternoon to pledge his continued support, adding, “I know he’s going to stand by me.”
But after watching Kavanaugh on Fox, the president wasn’t so sure. According to the Trump playbook—hit back harder—Kavanaugh had failed miserably with his tepid, awkward performance. The president began entertaining a scenario in which the White House moved on to plan B: pick another nominee with less baggage. “We had numerous conversations about it through the course of time,” McConnell later told The New York Times, adding of Trump, “But he hung in there.” (During the toughest points of the confirmation fight, McConnell would also assure Trump, “I’m stronger than mule piss.”)
The Fox performance was vintage Kavanaugh, whom colleagues and former clerks had described as focused and even-tempered over the years, even in stressful situations. But Republican Senate staffers, who thought the TV setting of drawn blinds and dim lighting looked like a hostage situation, were also incredulous at Kavanaugh’s cool demeanor, arguing that this crucial juncture called for considerably more righteous indignation. “‘I want a fair process’?” said one aide, mimicking Kavanaugh. “Why don’t you say you’re not a gang rapist? That would be more helpful.”
Kavanaugh’s closest advisers shared the feedback with him more gently. He should have been on offense, not defense. If given the opportunity, he would have to do better next time.
In the practice sessions on the fourth floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building—known as “murder boards” or “moots”—Kavanaugh had been gearing up to be interrogated about the Ford and Ramirez allegations. Now he also had to ready himself for questions about his high school yearbook.
On September 24, shortly after the Fox interview, The New York Times reported that Kavanaugh and his close high school friends, including Mark Judge, had bragged at Georgetown Prep about their sexual interactions with Renate Schroeder—a student at the nearby girls’ school Stone Ridge who was a year younger—and memorialized their assertions with a club dubbed “Renate Alumnius” in their yearbook.
The boasts about fooling around or having sex with Schroeder, which were made around the fields and hallways of Prep—and in a ditty about her that was published in an inexplicit form on Kavanaugh’s friend Michael Walsh’s yearbook page—were frequent and offensive during the early 1980s. All in all, Kavanaugh and thirteen other boys had Renate references on their personal yearbook pages. A group photo of the future judge and some of his closest friends in their football gear was captioned “Renate Alumni,” which, in that context, suggested they had all been physically involved with her.
Through his attorney Alex Walsh, Kavanaugh denied having boasted about such sexual conquests. But Renate herself, now a Connecticut wife and mother with the married name Dolphin, called out the “insinuation” as “horrible, hurtful, and simply untrue.” Although she had been friends with Kavanaugh and other members of his circle at the time, she had not known of the sexual references implied by the yearbook or the song that belittled her. She and her friends from that era said she had never had sex with any of the Prep boys.
Compared with the physical assault described by Ford, the Renate story was far less serious. But once again, details became data points. The Renate chapter wasn’t just an unsavory but sadly typical teenage vulgarism; it seemed to confirm the misogynistic mindset that many Kavanaugh critics suspected he held, at least during the early 1980s, when the Ford and Ramirez events allegedly occurred.
First thing Wednesday morning, September 26, Katz, Bromwich, and their team were back at the Watergate with Ford, this time armed with a draft of prepared comments for her to consider reading at the hearing. It was about twenty pages, double-spaced, describing her mentality in coming forward and then, in some detail, the 1982 encounter she remembered with Kavanaugh and its aftermath. Ford read through it and immediately went to work with a red pen, spending about an hour and a half marking up every page. Yet even four days after the Senate Judiciary Committee announcement that she’d appear in a public hearing on Thursday, as television networks arranged for their live feeds and the public waited in nervous anticipation of what they would soon hear, she had not yet committed herself to open testimony.
Throughout the day, her team was in and out of the hotel conference room. Katz worked from her Dupont Circle office, making tweaks to the opening statement from there. Banks and Bromwich talked Ford through the likely order of the coming proceedings: she’d give her prepared remarks, then submit to question-and-answer sessions, each of which would take five minutes. The questioners would alternate between Republicans and Democrats. The Republicans had delegated as their interlocutor Rachel Mitchell, a sex crimes prosecutor from Arizona, who had flown in for the hearing.
Ford was focused. She resisted the idea of a practice session. She told her lawyers that she didn’t want her answers to be scripted in any way. She wanted the wording in the opening remarks to be precise, to capture only what she remembered clearly. She would be up front about whatever she could not recall.
Around five o’clock that afternoon, Seidman entered the conference room where Ford was conferring with Bromwich and Robbins. “I need to talk to you about the hearing,” she said.
She wanted Ford to concede to public testimony. “I know you intended for it to be private, and you don’t want a circus,” Seidman explained, “but if it’s entirely private, then senators who will be making decisions won’t hear your testimony.” Only the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee members would hear Ford’s input firsthand, Seidman added. The other seventy-nine senators who would cast pivotal votes on Kavanaugh would be informed mostly by secondhand accounts as they made their decisions.
Seidman noted that Ford’s team had obtained as many provisions as possible to make Ford feel comfortable. They had secured a smaller hearing room, ensured that she could sit with her lawyers abreast, and had limited the number of cameras that would shoot the proceedings. Seidman had drawn a diagram of what the room looked like. She offered to show it to Ford.
“I don’t want to see it,” Ford replied. “It’ll make me nervous.”
Nevertheless, she agreed.
Conservatives were approaching the next day’s hearings with no small amount of chagrin. Many bitterly asserted that a fair hearing—Kavanaugh’s mantra in his Fox interview—appeared to no longer be possible in the United States. A person’s entire career and reputation could be sullied in a matter of days, even if the accusation was thirty-six years old, the principals were young, and there was no apparent proof.
Others felt that every story unearthed—Ford, Ramirez, Renate—only confirmed the callousness of the candidate at his core. The seventeen-year-old Kavanaugh did, they believed, implicate the fifty-three-year-old Kavanaugh and very likely meant there were other incidents involving him out there.
The Republicans on the committee staff were frustrated. Since the Ford allegations had been made public, Davis—like Katz and Banks—had been managing a slew of other distasteful accounts about Kavanaugh, investigating each of them on Grassley’s behalf. None seemed to have any substance, and the Swetnick accusations, which were bogged down in arguments with her lawyer, Avenatti, over revealing additional evidence, appeared to majority staffs and senators to be as baseless as they were outlandish. But with each allegation, thin or credible, the portrait of Kavanaugh and his high school buddy Judge as accomplices in sexual misconduct was becoming fixed in the public consciousness.
There was a story reported by a Tiverton, Rhode Island, man named Jeffrey Catalan of men named Brett and Mark sexually assaulting a woman on a Rhode Island boat in 1985, when Kavanaugh would have been a sophomore or junior in college. Catalan, after saying initially that he thought he recognized Kavanaugh from old pictures in the media, later said he couldn’t be sure.
There was an anonymous tip sent to Senator Kamala Harris’s San Diego office from a woman who claimed to have been raped in the back of a car by both Kavanaugh and a friend on an unknown date and location. That woman, whom Senate investigators referred to as Jane Doe, was never clearly identified, though a woman named Judy Munro-Leighton later claimed credit for the story—and then said she had made it up as a ploy to get attention.
Working regularly until 3 or 4 a.m. and deploying a staff of two dozen, Davis did his best to quash the stories like a game of whack-a-mole, upbraiding those who would air ad hominem attacks, sharing only the most important details with his boss, Grassley. Davis spent much of his forty-first birthday, which fell on the same Sunday that the committee announced Ford’s September 27 testimony, sitting in his Hart building office in a blazer and khakis—weekend wear for the Grassley team—preparing for Thursday’s hearings. Sitting in his spare space, which was decorated with little more than a picture from his clerkship with Gorsuch, he had a view of the atrium and the offices of Democratic senators beyond. Their windows were plastered with signs saying BELIEVE ALL SURVIVORS.
Davis himself was incredulous about Ford’s story. He regarded Katz and her colleagues—who, after all, had been connected with Ford by Feinstein’s office—as liberal hacks with a political agenda. Their calls for an FBI investigation, he believed, were nothing more than stall tactics, a way to obfuscate an uncorroborated story from ages ago that should not be permitted to take down an accomplished, upstanding nominee.
Kavanaugh spent Wednesday afternoon working on his prepared statements for the next day. He labored solitarily for hours, stretching well into the night.
Thursday, September 27, dawned cloudy but warm in Washington. At the Watergate Hotel, the Palo Alto contingent rose early and dressed for what was sure to be a draining day. Seven miles north, in Chevy Chase, Kavanaugh was putting the finishing touches on his prepared remarks, which he had shared with just one other person, his former law clerk Porter Wilkinson. Wilkinson was a young lawyer who had gone on to clerk for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. before joining the Smithsonian Institution.
Shortly before 10 a.m., Ford, dressed in a midnight-blue dress and jacket, her blond hair styled into soft waves, entered the hearing room, accompanied by a large bodyguard wearing a suit with a blue silk pocket square. At the witness table, Katz, wearing a black pinstriped suit over a white shell top and glasses tipped down the bridge of her nose, sat to Ford’s right; Bromwich, in a dark suit and bright blue tie, was to her left. They handed Ford materials and whispered last-minute instructions.
Behind them were Banks and Joseph Abboud, an associate who had worked closely with Katz and Banks; Ford’s friends Jay Backstrand and Keith Koegler; her Holton schoolmates Cheryl Amitay and Mimi Micklitsch Mulligan; and Sandra Gichner, one of Ford’s closest high school friends and now a Holton trustee. All wore Senate-issued brown witness badges.
Supporters from Ford’s Holton days, as well as some of the school’s current students—dressed in their pleated navy-blue-and-white plaid uniforms—also took seats, along with Leimroth and the other friends from home. Alyssa Milano, the Charmed actor and #MeToo activist, was in attendance, noticeable in a loose, dark top, high bun, and grave expression.
Ford’s parents and two brothers, who had not learned of her experience until the summer of 2018, were absent—a detail Republicans would pounce on as evidence that her family would not vouch for her credibility. Those closer to the situation later said the reality was more complicated: while Ford’s family supported her, they were also Republicans who were deeply entrenched in the Bethesda world of the Kavanaughs. This was a difficult public ordeal for them.
As the hearing got under way, the Democrats and Republicans vacillated between wanting to show courtesy to the principal witnesses and wanting to score political points.
Grassley began by thanking both Ford and Kavanaugh for appearing, and he apologized for their rough treatment by the public in the prior weeks. He also criticized Feinstein and her colleagues for harboring Ford’s “secret” letter until the last minute, a letter that contained damaging allegations of which there had never been a “whiff” in preceding FBI background checks.
The senator bemoaned the leaking of Ford’s name to the press, chastised his Democratic counterparts for what he described as a lack of cooperation with his own staff’s investigations of the claims against Kavanaugh, and complained that Kavanaugh’s other accusers—namely, Ramirez and Swetnick—had not produced evidence despite repeated requests. “This will be in stark contrast to the grandstanding and chaos that we saw from the other side during the previous four days in this hearing process,” he said. Then he turned the floor over to Feinstein.
The ranking member welcomed Ford, praised her résumé, and spoke at length about the Anita Hill hearings of twenty-seven years earlier, pointing out how little had changed, given the skepticism faced by Hill—and, now, Ford. She clearly wanted to remind the American audience of the Senate’s ignominious chapter in 1991, when many felt that a dignified professional woman had been unjustly humiliated and discounted. Feinstein invoked the accusations of Ramirez and Swetnick, as well as the attestations of some of Kavanaugh’s college friends who by now had called his denials of bad behavior dishonest.
“The entire country is watching how we handle these allegations. I hope the majority changes their tactics, opens their mind, and seriously reflects on why we are here,” Feinstein concluded. “We are here for one reason: to determine whether Judge Kavanaugh should be elevated to one of the most powerful positions in our country.”
Grassley replied that he was sorry Feinstein had mentioned the “unsubstantiated allegations of other people,” clearly wanting to remind viewers that stories gain credence merely by their repetition. Then he swore Ford in.
Cameras whirred as the cramped hearing room grew hushed. As soon as Ford began speaking, the posturing and partisanship that had characterized the proceedings thus far fell away. There was only a seemingly average woman who had pushed through her paralyzing fear to come to tell her story. And the whole world was watching.
“I am here today not because I want to be,” began Ford in a quivering voice. “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.”
Ford’s testimony played out like a master class in authenticity and simplicity. She made no sweeping statements and proffered no larger agenda. Instead, Ford stuck to the only topic on which she had authority: what she remembered and how it had affected her.
She explained how she came to meet Kavanaugh, whom she described as “the boy who sexually assaulted me.” She described what had happened at the gathering after a day of swimming and diving at the Columbia Country Club in 1982. She admitted what she did not recall.
“I truly wish I could be more helpful with more detailed answers to all of the questions that have and will be asked about how I got to the party and where it took place and so forth. I don’t have all the answers, and I don’t remember as much as I would like to.
“But the details that—about that night that bring me here today,” she added, “are the ones I will never forget. They have been seared into my memory, and have haunted me episodically as an adult.”
The account was raw and wrenching. At many points, Ford spoke hoarsely and appeared to be choking back tears, not bothering to move aside the loose lock of hair that sometimes fell over her face. The senators listened, some impassively, some with their eyes downcast. Grassley nodded almost imperceptibly.
Ford spoke about how she had grappled with her memories, telling very few friends, and leaving out specific details, until recent years. She talked about feeling an obligation to share with the committee what she regarded as relevant information while fearing for her privacy. “Sexual assault victims should be able to decide for themselves when and whether their private experience is made public,” she said.
She recounted the painful process of deciding whether it was fruitless to come forward, especially once Kavanaugh’s confirmation seemed all but certain. She offered a window into her own ambivalence that had surfaced as recently as two days earlier, on the plane to Washington.
“As the hearing date got closer, I struggled with a terrible choice: Do I share the facts with the Senate and put myself and my family in the public spotlight?” she said. “Or do I preserve our privacy and allow the Senate to make its decision without knowing the full truth of his past behaviors?”
She related how the decision was soon made for her when reporters swarmed her home and workplace, leaving numerous messages for her friends and bosses. She recalled giving her story to The Washington Post and the horrifying backlash that followed.
“My family and I have been the target of constant harassment and death threats, and I have been called the most vile and hateful names imaginable,” she said. “These messages, while far fewer than the expressions of support, have been terrifying and have rocked me to my core.”
She said that since September 16, she and her family had moved from one location to another, sometimes together and sometimes not. Her work email had been hacked, she said, and false messages had been distributed from her account. She had been depicted by some as a political operative, a characterization she disputed. “It is not my responsibility to determine whether Mr. Kavanaugh deserves to sit on the Supreme Court,” she said. “My responsibility is to tell you the truth.”
The floor was then turned over to the questioner hired by Republicans, Rachel Mitchell. The format was atypical—senators usually ask their own questions—but the Republicans had deemed it important to have a seemingly impartial female interlocutor rather than give the appearance of a bunch of white powerful men bearing down on Ford.
A meticulous and plainspoken lawyer with a short, blunt haircut and rimless glasses, Mitchell seemed ideally suited for the job—a benign, by-the-book presence devoid of prosecutorial zeal. She had not been easy to find. Republican committee staffers spent long hours contacting dozens of female lawyers about doing the questioning at the hearing. Quite a few turned them down, presumably wanting to avoid the highly charged, politicized process.
Mitchell had overseen the special victims unit of the Maricopa County attorney’s office in Arizona, spent a dozen years in the sex crimes subdivision, and handled some major local cases. She was there to stand in for the male senators—to ask their tough questions, softened with a veneer of compassion and expertise. Mitchell had interviewed many sexual assault victims and mentored other young prosecutors on best practices.
It was the type of sensibility Republicans sorely needed twenty-seven years after the Hill hearings, at a time when women’s professional and political advances, along with the advent of #MeToo, had led to many Americans demanding better treatment of accusers. But the fact that Mitchell was representing a panel consisting entirely of white male Republicans on the committee—some of them well into their eighties—remained unavoidable. A number of the people who attended the hearing would later say that Mitchell’s presence—that of a lone woman sitting at a small desk far below the dais, asking questions on behalf of the senior male senators above her until she was cut off—was one of the most disconcerting elements of an already unsettling day.
Mitchell, dressed in a powder blue shirt and dark blue jacket, greeted Ford warmly. She urged her to let her know if she found anything confusing or unclear. But just as they began to delve into the letter Ford had written to Feinstein, Grassley cut them off.
“Ms. Mitchell, I don’t know whether this is fair for me to interrupt, but I want to keep people within five minutes. Is that a—is that a major problem for you in the middle of a question?” he asked, adding that for equity’s sake, he needed to move on to the next Democratic questioner.
Mitchell quickly assented.
As the hearing went on, Mitchell would pick up with her careful deconstruction of Ford’s recollections of Kavanaugh, looking for inconsistencies in her account, or for additional specifics. She probed on the alleged geographical area of the assault and about whether there were any other factors in Ford’s life that could have contributed to the anxiety and PTSD-like symptoms she had largely ascribed to her alleged assault by Kavanaugh. Then a Democratic senator would have a turn, thanking Ford for her testimony and asking further questions about how the alleged incident impacted her life.
Some of the Democratic rounds seemed like showboating, however well intentioned. Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, both of whom would announce presidential campaigns in the months to come, made particularly long, principled speeches before directly questioning Ford. Professorial, polite, and composed, Ford repeatedly apologized for herself in a small voice, saying “I wish I could be more helpful” when she could not recall a particular detail, and timidly requesting caffeine. “I’m used to being collegial,” she said at one point.
She came across as both knowledgeable—using scientific jargon like “sequelae” in reference to the aftereffects of her trauma—and, at times, strikingly naive. “I don’t understand,” she whispered audibly to Bromwich at one point, in response to Mitchell’s targeted line of questioning about whether she had spoken to members of Congress after her August 7 polygraph.
Ford was forced to walk that fine line commonly navigated by women: appearing firm and confident without coming across as strident, unlikable, or unstable. Ford prevailed. Her equanimity would later be contrasted with Kavanaugh’s overwrought delivery, which, ironically, was forgiven by many as understandable passion in the heat of self-defense.
In one of the more memorable moments of the hearing, Ford described to Vermont senator Patrick Leahy, a Democrat, what was unforgettable about her Kavanaugh memory. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” she said tearfully, referring to the sound of Kavanaugh and Judge’s hilarity during and after her alleged assault, “the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.”
Despite her occasionally halting delivery, Ford was firm on one point: the man on top of her had been Brett Kavanaugh. “Dr. Ford,” asked Senator Dick Durbin, the Democrat from Illinois, “with what degree of certainty do you believe Brett Kavanaugh assaulted you?”
She answered without hesitating: “One hundred percent.”