Years ago, when she was practicing her closing arguments at the family dinner table, Martha Kavanaugh often returned to her signature line as a state prosecutor. “Use your common sense,” she’d say. “What rings true? What rings false?”
Those words made a strong impression on her young son, Brett. They also made a strong impression on us as the authors of this book. In reviewing our findings, we looked at them in two ways: through the prism of reporting and through the lens of common sense.
As women, we know that sexual assaults often aren’t corroborated. They often happen without witnesses, and many victims avoid reporting them out of shame or fear. But as reporters, we need evidence; we rely on the facts. Without corroboration, Ford’s and Ramirez’s claims would be hard to accept.
As women, we could not help but be moved by the accounts of Ford and Ramirez, and understand why they made such a lasting impact. As reporters, we had a responsibility to test those predilections. We had to offer Kavanaugh the benefit of the doubt, venturing to empathize with his suffering if he was falsely accused.
As mothers of daughters, we were prone to believe and support the women who spoke up. As mothers of sons, we had to imagine what it would be like if the men we loved were wrongly charged with these offenses.
As people, our gut reaction was that the allegations of Ford and Ramirez from the past rang true. As reporters, we uncovered nothing to suggest that Kavanaugh has mistreated women in the years since.
Ultimately, we combined our notebooks with our common sense and came to believe an utterly human narrative: that Ford and Ramirez were mistreated by Kavanaugh as a teenager, and that Kavanaugh over the next thirty-five years became a better person.
We come to this complicated, seemingly contradictory, and perhaps unsatisfying conclusion based on the facts as we found them.
In the course of our ten-month investigation, we conducted hundreds of interviews with principal players in Kavanaugh’s education, career, and confirmation. We read thousands of documents. We reviewed hours of television interviews, along with reams of newspaper, magazine, and digital coverage. We studied maps of Montgomery County as well as housing renovation plans and court records. We watched Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings multiple times.
Unproven as it is, the account of Christine Blasey Ford—to use Martha’s phrase—“rings true.” Ford’s social circle overlapped with that of Kavanaugh as a high school student. She dated his good friend Chris Garrett. Her good friend Leland Keyser dated Mark Judge. Judge and Kavanaugh, whom Ford recalled being together in the room where she was assaulted, were close friends. They were often seen together at parties, and their tendency to drink beer, sometimes to excess, was well known.
None of that means that Ford was, in fact, assaulted by Kavanaugh. But it does mean that she has a baseline level of credibility as an accuser.
Her credibility is affirmed in other ways, too. We have seen no evidence of Ford fabricating stories, either recently or historically. Multiple people attest to her honesty. Last August, she passed a polygraph test focused on her Kavanaugh memories. Her former boyfriend Brian Merrick said in a sworn affidavit to the Senate Judiciary Committee that he hadn’t known of her fear of flying or of tight spaces when they dated in the 1990s, raising questions for Republicans about the anxiety issues Ford has attributed in part to the alleged assault. But Merrick also said in the affidavit and in a later interview that he never doubted Ford’s truthfulness.
Experts on both memory and sex crimes say that Ford’s spotty recollections of the alleged assault are in line with those of a typical victim: clear on the basic elements of the violation and its perpetrator (especially given that, in this case, that person was alleged to be an acquaintance), hazy on ancillary elements like the exact location and the transportation that got her there and back. Victims also often keep their experiences to themselves.
“She was one of the most competent, credible, and believable witnesses I have ever seen in over a decade of prosecuting cases,” said Allison Leotta, who spent twelve years as a federal prosecutor in Washington, focusing on sex crimes, domestic violence, and child abuse. “What she described was a very bread-and-butter acquaintance sexual assault.”
Using Martha’s common-sense standard, there is no reason Ford would have come forward with her account if she didn’t believe it. Ford has led a quiet life for many years. She has no love of the spotlight, and she pleaded with lawmakers and The Washington Post for weeks to preserve her privacy. It was only when Ford believed she was on the brink of being exposed that she identified herself publicly. After that, she endured a terrifying series of death threats and other harassment, forcing her family to separate at times and to relocate. The time it took to testify and secure herself and her family forced Ford to take time away from her teaching job.
Moreover, we have seen no evidence that she was influenced by anyone, other than the family and friends from whom she sought counsel, the California congresswoman and senator she contacted for help, and the lawyers she handpicked from a list of suggestions. To date, Ford has enjoyed no apparent financial gain as a result of coming forward. Her lawyers and public relations advisers donated their time. Her transportation to Washington was covered, to keep her safe and comfortable before and after her testimony. Her security costs were handled by a crowdsourced GoFundMe account. The money left over once her expenses were paid has been designated for trauma survivors.
Other leads we pursued neither indicted nor exonerated Kavanaugh.
We located Judge, who declined to elaborate much beyond his statement to the public and to the FBI, which was that he didn’t remember the incident. We reached out, repeatedly, to Smyth, the third boy who allegedly attended the party but did not witness the assault. Smyth did not answer our calls and emails, but he has consistently said to friends as well as to the FBI that he has no memory of the event or of Ford. We spoke multiple times to Keyser, who also said that she didn’t recall that get-together or any others like it. In fact, she challenged Ford’s accuracy. “I don’t have any confidence in the story,” she said.
But Keyser’s skepticism was structured on some erroneous or irrelevant tent poles. Keyser thought the whole setup Ford described—the Columbia Country Club, followed by a gathering with boys at a local home—sounded wrong, given that Keyser was working at the Congressional Country Club that summer. But Keyser acknowledged that she was a member of the Columbia club, and that she might have stopped by to watch Ford dive and they decided to go to a party. (Ford also said not to assume that the gathering had originated at the club, guessing that it might have been arranged by Keyser and Judge by phone or in person elsewhere.)
Keyser said she didn’t recognize Kavanaugh from high school photos. She did recognize and remember Judge, whom she said she had dated once or twice and bumped into at a recovery meeting in Potomac in the mid-aughts. It is possible that Ford’s account is wrong and that Keyser’s lack of recollection is proof of that. But experts say that memories of insignificant people and places in our lives often aren’t stored. And Keyser’s memory might be affected by her struggles with alcohol and other substances. In the months after the confirmation battle, she continued to appear perturbed by her unexpected role in it, indicating in a text message to one of the authors late in March that she believed she was being surveilled at home, possibly by people related to the Kavanaugh matter.
We looked for the house, which Ford said was located somewhere between hers, in Potomac, and the Columbia Country Club. She had described the layout: barely furnished, containing an upstairs level, and, perhaps most critically, featuring a narrow set of stairs with walls on both sides. She said that Judge in particular seemed possessive of the place, suggesting that it belonged to him, a friend, or a relation.
Working with those parameters, we looked for family members whose house Judge might have accessed, with or without its inhabitants’ permission. We ruled out his older siblings, who, according to his brother, Michael, were not living in the area in question at that time. We also ruled out his grandmother, who had lived on the Washington side of Chevy Chase, with her adult daughter, Anita—Mark and Michael’s aunt. The two women rarely went out in those days, according to Michael. (The layout of that house, which was sold years ago and was recently rented by Mike Pence before he became vice president, also didn’t match.)
Eventually, we generated a short list of two possibilities, one belonging to a Judge family friend in Potomac and the other to a Georgetown Prep classmate in Bethesda. Both houses have been renovated, and floor plans and other housing documents in Montgomery County from before 1986 are scarce. Ultimately, since the houses’ layouts from 1982 couldn’t be firmly established, Ford could not make clear determinations on whether either resembled the one she remembered.
According to Martha’s common-sense test, the claims of Deborah Ramirez, while not proven by witnesses, also ring true. Ramirez, who was a Yale classmate of Kavanaugh’s, said he thrust his penis at her during a drunken party in their freshman-year dormitory, Lawrance Hall. The people who allegedly witnessed the event—Kavanaugh’s friends Kevin Genda, David Todd, and David White—have kept mum about it. Kavanaugh has denied it. If such an incident had occurred, Kavanaugh said, it would have been “the talk of campus.”
Our reporting suggests that, in fact, it was. At least five people have a strong recollection of hearing about the alleged incident with Ramirez long before Kavanaugh was a federal judge. Yale classmates Kenneth Appold and Richard Oh recall hearing about it immediately after it happened. Ramirez’s mother, Mary Ann LeBlanc, recalls being told about it by her daughter—without specifics—during college. Michael Wetstone, a graduate school classmate of Appold in religious studies, recalls being told about the incident by Appold within a few years of when it allegedly happened. A fifth person—an unidentified friend of Ramirez’s who said in a recent affidavit that she heard about the incident in the 1990s—remembers being told about it within a decade of its alleged occurrence. And two other people from Kavanaugh and Ramirez’s Yale class, Chad Ludington and James Roche, vaguely remember hearing about something happening to Ramirez during freshman year.
Of course, given the lack of eyewitness corroboration, Ramirez could be misremembering the situation, perhaps due to inebriation. She has said she doesn’t remember telling anyone what happened in the immediate aftermath of the alleged event. But since the story got around campus anyway, either Ramirez is mistaken in that, or some other witness to the event repeated the account and spread the story to others. Like Ford, Ramirez has no apparent personal or political motivation to bring down Kavanaugh. It did not even occur to her to tell her story publicly; she was contacted about it by The New Yorker, which was following up on a tip it had received from another source. Many friends and former classmates have described Ramirez as both honest and guileless.
Next to the two credible witnesses—Ford and Ramirez—are a number of less convincing ones. The most notable of them is Julie Swetnick, who claimed to have been gang-raped by a group of unidentified boys at a 1982 party where Kavanaugh and Judge were present. Swetnick also said she had attended more than ten parties with Kavanaugh and Judge, and that she had seen the two participate in “trains” of boys waiting to have sex with incapacitated girls at “many” of those parties.
Kavanaugh called those allegations “outrageous.” Swetnick’s lawyer, Michael Avenatti, never made himself or his client available for questions for this book, despite multiple requests. Numerous Georgetown Prep alumni from that era—including some who were supportive of Ford—cast doubt upon aspects of Swetnick’s account. Generally speaking, they said that, while isolated incidents of assault might have occurred without their knowledge, there would have been no way that repeated gang rapes could have taken place without a larger group of them being aware of it, especially if they involved Kavanaugh and Judge, who were very social.
“What I was thinking, and what kind of was reflected in the conversations I had with others, was ‘Did you ever hear anything about this? No? No, nothing?’” said Tom Downey, one of Kavanaugh’s Prep classmates, in an interview. “I never saw it. And, boy oh boy, if it had happened ten times, eight times, we all would’ve known about it.”
Using Martha’s common-sense test, the Swetnick allegations, at least as they pertain to Kavanaugh and Judge, “ring false.” The same can be said of an account that the two men sexually assaulted a woman on a Rhode Island boat in 1985. It can also be said about yet another account that Kavanaugh groped, assaulted, and raped a woman in the backseat of a car at a date and place that were not identified.
Even with these questionable or admittedly false accounts of sexual assault, however, there exists a through line with the more substantiated ones: heavy drinking. Kavanaugh’s alcohol use as a young man seems to have led to both bad behavior and, very possibly, bad memory. Scores of friends and former classmates have attested to Kavanaugh’s penchant for beer and for excessive drinking during his high school and college years. Kavanaugh himself said, repeatedly, “Sometimes I had too many beers.”
He denied that he ever forgot what happened during a night of heavy alcohol consumption. But friends and former classmates say that his slurring, stumbling reactions to alcohol in college—which led in one case to damaging a car and in another to helping provoke a bar fight—suggest otherwise. And the probability that Kavanaugh experienced memory loss when drunk—even if he can’t, or won’t, acknowledge it—means there is at least some possibility that he mistreated the women in question but truly doesn’t remember it.
We considered the theory that Kavanaugh had lied—about the Ford assault, the Ramirez incident, or even the fact that he’d never blacked out from drinking. According to Martha’s common-sense test, Kavanaugh had an incentive to beat back any blot on his moral character while under consideration for one of the most trusted positions in our democracy. Such potential taints, of course, would include sexual assault, boorish behavior in general, and irresponsible drinking. Prior Supreme Court nominations have been scuttled over far less. Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg, for example, was forced to withdraw his nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987 after admitting that he had smoked marijuana, an issue that would not likely trouble many senators today.
Based on our reporting, Kavanaugh’s testimony contained a number of inaccurate or misleading assertions: that the references to Renate in the yearbook were innocent homages, for example, or that he was not indeed the character named Bart O’Kavanaugh in Judge’s book. Multiple classmates from Georgetown Prep recall the sexually themed boasts that Kavanaugh and his friends made about a young Renate, and the fact that Kavanaugh’s nickname was Bart was so well established that during his confirmation hearings it was used in group emails involving him and his classmates.
But in his testimony, Kavanaugh put a glossier sheen on the Renate matter—calling it a “clumsily intended” reference meant to “show affection.” He essentially evaded the O’Kavanaugh question (having threatened to sue Judge in 1997 if he used his real name in the book). “You’d have to ask him,” Kavanaugh told Senator Leahy when asked whether Judge had been referring to him with the name O’Kavanaugh.
These dodges and others like them, while certainly artful and perhaps disingenuous, may not technically amount to lying—particularly since Kavanaugh, as an experienced lawyer, knows well the perils of doing so under oath. Kavanaugh instead could have offered up incomplete versions of the truth, or representations of his past behaviors that were kinder than the perceptions of other people—who were also there and had the benefit of greater objectivity. Without knowing what memories lay in Kavanaugh’s head when he spoke, however, it is hard for us to separate lies from bad or manipulated facts.
We considered Kavanaugh’s discussions of his drinking and sexual history. During the hearings, he frequently made only the most grudging admissions of excessive boozing—for example, using “Sometimes I had too many beers” to cover years of what at times appears to have been binge drinking. Still, he was acknowledging the behavior, even if his former classmates found that acknowledgment inadequate. He was less elliptical about the sexual assault accusations, categorically denying that he had ever sexually assaulted anyone, ever. He denied the Ford and Ramirez claims specifically. He asserted that he was a virgin through high school and for “many years” afterward, even though his virginity was at best a contextual detail, rather than evidence disproving that he sexually assaulted women.
By allowing no possibility that he had ever assaulted anyone, including Ford, or exposed his penis to Ramirez, Kavanaugh may have boxed himself into a lie. But that’s the case only if he knowingly uttered a falsehood by denying events he actually did remember. If he genuinely has no recollection of them, and no document, friend, or other evidence surfaced, he was not consciously being dishonest.
Some have offered the position that Kavanaugh was a blackout drinker who lost portions of his memory and simply wasn’t aware of it. That notion sounds plausible. In a blackout state—a complex neurological condition—portions of memory may be lost without a person’s realizing it. Only later evidence of what happened in the lost moments can demonstrate the lapse.
Sarah Hepola, author of the bestseller Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget, wrote in an opinion column last year, “Blackouts are like a philosophical riddle inside a legal conundrum: If you can’t remember a thing, how do you know it happened?”
Of all the fraught moments at the September 27 hearing, the questioning about blacking out seemed to exercise Kavanaugh most. During a back-and-forth with Senator Klobuchar in which she shared the fact of her own father’s alcoholism, Kavanaugh grew so rude and disrespectful that he later felt obligated to apologize. During an exchange with the prosecutor Rachel Mitchell about whether he had ever blacked out, passed out, or otherwise lost memory during a period of copious drinking, Kavanaugh bristled, stammered, and seemed to scoff. A third exchange with Senator Whitehouse, about the “Ralph Club” and other references to excessive drinking from Kavanaugh’s yearbook, was venomous. But because it appears unlikely we’ll find evidence either to prove the 1982 allegations or to discover exactly what was in Kavanaugh’s head during those hearings thirty-six years later, the blackout theory—at least as it pertains to Ford—is probably destined to be no more than that.
Above and beyond the accusations of misdeeds, the charges of telling falsehoods, and the theme of heavy drinking sits another, more encompassing, dilemma: Kavanaugh’s temperament. Despite superlative marks from the American Bar Association and many associates, Kavanaugh’s usual evenness was absent from the September 27 hearing.
His furious, indignant exchanges with senators during the testimony were searing. They caused retired justice John Paul Stevens, who had once praised Kavanaugh’s jurisprudence, to say the judge was unfit for the high court. More than 2,400 law professors and many Americans agreed. The Bar Association called for an FBI investigation. Given that the hearings had technically been a job interview and not a criminal proceeding, several pundits argued that Kavanaugh blew it.
On October 4, Kavanaugh realized his mistake and tried to make amends. His performance the prior week, he wrote in an op-ed, “reflected my overwhelming frustration at being wrongly accused, without corroboration, of horrible conduct completely contrary to my record and character. My statement and answers also reflected my deep distress at the unfairness of how this allegation has been handled. . . . I might have been too emotional at times. I know that my tone was sharp, and I said a few things I should not have said. I hope everyone can understand that I was there as a son, husband and dad. I testified with five people foremost in my mind: my mom, my dad, my wife, and most of all my daughters.” He promised Americans that he would return to the equilibrium and fair-mindedness he had long demonstrated.
Temperament was not a central focus of our investigation. But it is worth noting that our reporting showed Kavanaugh’s to be historically courteous. Young lawyers were struck by his interest in their careers, how Kavanaugh would chat for hours after Federalist Society gatherings or—in bumping into them on the D.C. Metro—inquire about their work in a way that reflected how closely he’d listened in the past.
Former colleagues described him as unassuming and unpretentious—“a Bud Light kind of guy,” in the words of Richard Re, an assistant professor at UCLA School of Law, who clerked for Kavanaugh on the federal appeals court.
A journalist who covered Kavanaugh’s circuit court saw him often in the cafeteria line, talking baseball with the staff as he ordered his sandwich. Dozens of former clerks, many of them women, cited his mentorship, his warmth, his eagerness to help advance their professional prospects, and his willingness to support their personal lives, including raising families. Many said they had never seen Kavanaugh as inflamed as he had been on September 27—neither before nor since.
None of this is an excuse for what many regarded as an offensive and potentially prejudicial performance. But it provides some context.
As reporters, it’s not for us to opine on whether Kavanaugh’s youthful misdeeds or angry testimony should have blocked him from the Supreme Court. That question was left to the president, who supported Kavanaugh’s confirmation; the Senate, which voted to approve him; and, ultimately, American voters, who showed their feelings at the ballot box and in impeachment petitions. Some thought the mere possibility that Kavanaugh had assaulted Ford and others—allegations that, they felt, were bolstered by the stories of heavy drinking and chauvinistic yearbook boasts—meant Kavanaugh should have been replaced. Others point out that our juvenile-justice system is built on the long-held belief that a young person’s bad decisions shouldn’t haunt them for years to come. That is why most juvenile records and many juvenile court proceedings are kept largely confidential.
The country was deeply and bitterly divided on Kavanaugh. In the days after the polarizing hearings, 48 percent of Americans opposed his confirmation, and about 42 percent supported it, according to a Quinnipiac poll. Arguments about Ford’s motivations and Kavanaugh’s performance split families and friends. Those standoffs spilled into the halls of Capitol Hill, where longtime staffers found themselves in the most poisonous environment they could remember, with colleagues taking their disagreements over the confirmation process personally. “I can’t believe you guys are really doing this,” one aide to a senior Democratic senator remembers hearing from a Republican staffer.
Since the contentious confirmation hearings, the gulf separating Kavanaugh’s admirers and his detractors has only widened. In late December, most voters polled by the research firm PerryUndem believed Kavanaugh had lied about his teenage years. Forty-nine percent had a largely unfavorable impression of him, as compared with the 29 percent who had a favorable one. Thirty-five percent said the Senate did the right thing in confirming him; a close 41 percent disagreed. (By contrast, an overwhelming 58 percent of Americans polled after the Clarence Thomas confirmation supported him, with 30 percent opposed.) Fifty-five percent of voters believed Ford over Kavanaugh—a sixteen-point margin of favor.
The Kavanaugh confirmation stirred painful discussion about gender dynamics and who is empowered in our country. Parents had tough conversations with their children about consent and abuse. Grown men—including classmates of Kavanaugh’s at Yale and Georgetown Prep—contacted old girlfriends and apologized for pushy sexual behavior. Others hardened their belief that women are more likely than ever to interpret innocuous touches and comments as sexual assault or harassment, evidence of a #MeToo movement gone too far. Women thought hard about their underrepresentation in politics and in other professions.
On Tuesday, October 9, Kavanaugh reported to the Supreme Court for his first day on the bench. He heard oral arguments from two cases involving state sentencing practices for criminals with prior violent offenses, asking questions and deferentially apologizing for interrupting at one point. Despite female protesters outside the building, Kavanaugh was welcomed warmly by Chief Justice John Roberts and, at the end of the public session, shook hands with Justice Elena Kagan, who had hired him to teach at Harvard when she was dean of the law school. Ashley, Margaret, Liza, and his parents watched the proceedings.
Ford had a very different autumn. On leave from teaching because of the strain of the Kavanaugh hearings, she continued to receive devastating threats and online attacks. She and her family moved in and out of hotels and at least one borrowed house. Her video endorsement of Rachael Denhollander, the former gymnast who went public about the sexual abuse she’d endured from the physician Larry Nassar, was greeted with a spiteful backlash that left her emotionally reeling.
Over the months that followed, Ford would consider writing a book of her own or meeting with television producers. But the stress of reliving a past trauma, something she’d done at great length already, and the risk of pulling loved ones back into the klieg lights kept stopping her. She focused on how best to show her appreciation to the tens of thousands of letters of support she’d received, many from sexual assault survivors. She also became involved with the Project on Institutional Courage, which approaches problems of sexual violence through social science research.
Kavanaugh’s former classmates looked at their educational years in a new light. To some, the casual misogyny they remembered suddenly seemed more sinister and threatening. They bemoaned the ugliness of the confirmation process.
“Had it been in a different venue—privately, and without so much on the line as it relates to the political direction of this very country—then perhaps both of them could have been more genuine in terms of why they were there and why they were speaking about this incident,” said Joe Conaghan, a Prep classmate who signed a letter of support for Ford but nonetheless backed Kavanaugh’s confirmation.
“And if I’m right about what I suspect was true, which is that she was telling the truth,” Conaghan added, “then perhaps Brett would have been able to render an apology to her that might have helped her heal in a real, genuine way. But as it stands in my mind, neither one was healed by the incident, because it was so politicized.”
Polls show that the Kavanaugh confirmation had a direct impact on the midterm elections, in which Democrats took control of the House of Representatives and lost two seats in the Senate. Among the casualties were Democrats Heidi Heitkamp, Joe Donnelly, and Claire McCaskill, who lost their red-state Senate seats after voting against Kavanaugh; Joe Manchin may well have preserved his by voting for Kavanaugh. Some Democrats pledged to pursue impeachment proceedings against the newly seated justice.
Republican leaders fought back. Grassley referred Michael Avenatti, Swetnick’s attorney, for criminal investigation, along with the tipsters attached to the fallacious accounts of the Rhode Island assault and the backseat rape, as well as Swetnick herself. On November 2, committee Republicans issued a 414-page memo summarizing their actions during the Kavanaugh confirmation process, with related affidavits and interview transcripts attached. Since the memo, which contained a number of misleading or incomplete assertions—many of them unfavorable to Ford—was never approved by committee Democrats, it could not, technically, be considered an official report.
Some senators have capitalized on public profiles that were enhanced by the hearings, namely Senators Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Amy Klobuchar, who announced their candidacies for president in 2020, and Coons and Flake, who went on talk shows together to discuss their bipartisan efforts. Joe Biden, the former vice president and longtime senator who had chaired the Judiciary Committee during the Clarence Thomas confirmation, apologized to Anita Hill for the way he handled those hearings. (She did not accept.)
The hyperbolic rhetoric that had governed the process persisted. President Trump said that “it’s a very scary time for young men in America.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who received a standing ovation when he entered the East Room for Kavanaugh’s swearing-in, said the confirmation was “the single most important thing I’ve been involved in in my career.” Senator Lindsey Graham called the hearings “the low point of my time in the Senate.” Mike Davis, the powerful aide to the Judiciary Committee whose aggressive efforts helped pull Kavanaugh across the finish line, called the way the judge had been attacked “un-American.”
Senator Dianne Feinstein issued a statement saying that Kavanaugh’s confirmation had put “women’s reproductive rights, civil rights, environmental protections, worker’s rights, the ability to implement gun safety rules and the ability to hold presidents accountable at risk for a generation.
“Today is a sad day,” she added. “Tomorrow we must pick ourselves up and keep fighting.”
Eshoo also described herself as “enormously sad.”
“I was left with the feeling that he got away with something again,” she said in an interview. “Life is not a straight line—many times we wish it were. You take steps forward and you want to keep taking more steps in order to make progress, but there are always setbacks along the way.”
Deborah Ramirez continued to page through the many supportive notes she had saved. One contained a poem called “What Is Justice,” which made Ramirez think about what that concept meant for her. “You can’t look at justice as just the confirmation vote,” she said. “There is so much good that came out of it. There is so much more good to come.”
Christine Blasey Ford was selected as one of the Time 100, the magazine’s annual list of the year’s most influential people—as was Kavanaugh. She considered attending the April 23 ceremony in New York City, where celebrity honorees like Glenn Close, Martha Stewart, and Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson walked the red carpet and Taylor Swift performed hits like “Delicate” and “Shake It Off” at Frederick P. Rose Hall. In the end, however, Ford stayed home.
At the time of this writing, Kavanaugh has just completed his first term on the court. Whether he’ll prove a centrist and occasional swing voter, in the mold of his mentor Justice Anthony Kennedy, or a more reliable conservative, like his onetime schoolmate Justice Neil Gorsuch, remains to be seen. How Kavanaugh—and indeed the country—has been shaped by his confirmation will take time to understand. Painful as it seems now, the process had much to teach. As Virgil wrote in book one of The Aeneid, “Someday it will be helpful to have recalled even these events.”
Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly
July 2019