OPINION:
Christine Blasey Ford has spoken — and first impressions?
Her voice is like a little girl’s. Her professional credentials are extensive. She’s scared to death at the can of worms that’s been opened. And her testimony still leaves question marks in Brett Kavanaugh supporters’ minds.
“I am terrified,” she said, in her opening statement.
Terrified — and still dealing with the same issues about facts.
Under oath, she described Brett Kavanaugh as the “boy who sexually assaulted me.”
She then described a summertime party.
“I drank one beer,” she said. “Brett and Mark were visibly drunk. … Brett and Mark came from behind and pushed me into a bedroom.”
What followed was an emotional description of Kavanaugh’s alleged groping and attempts to remove her one-piece bathing suit.
“I believed he was going to rape me,” she said. “I tried to yell for help. When I did, Brett put his hand over my mouth.”
She also described how she was “able to get up and run out of the room,” and escape the party.
“Brett’s assault on me drastically altered my life,” she said. “I did not want to tell my parents … I convinced myself that because Brett did not rape me, I should just move on and pretend it did not happen. Over the years, I told very, very few friends that this had happened.”
And therein lies the problem — still.
Even Sen. Dianne Feinsteing saw the good foresight to ask, “why have you held it to yourself all these years?”
Good point. And sadly, Ford still didn’t offer a good response.
“I haven’t held it all these years,” she said. “I did disclose it in the confines of therapy.”
At the same time, in her opening remarks, Ford stipulated that the therapy didn’t come until 2012.
That’s still a lot of years in which Kavanaugh was moving up the public ranks, in the public eye, that Ford could’ve come forward with her accusations. But she didn’t. That’s problematic.
That’s problematic on surface, but problematic more so because of the politically charged atmosphere, the all-courts-press of Democrats to stymy President Donald Trump’s agenda, that utter opposition of the well-funded left — the George Soros well-funded ties, in some cases — to Kavanaugh and the failure of supporting evidence to paint Ford’s claims in irrefutable lights.
Here’s another problem: Changing statements, even now. Tweaked statements that seem to shift ever so slightly — but curiously so.
Ford, in her opening remarks, said the most terrifying moment of the attack came when Kavanaugh put his hand over her mouth. But some time later, Sen. Patrick Leahy asked Ford to name the “strongest moment,” the one she “cannot forget,” and she said this: “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter, the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.”
Meanwhile, Kavanaugh has denied all. Kavanaugh’s friends have similarly denied. And even Ford’s own witnesses have recanted and changed stories. Republicans on Friday will decide the fate of Kavanaugh’s nomination. But let’s hope in the end, allegations and accusations, largely unfounded, largely unproven, largely she-said, he-denied, don’t decide the fate of this nomination.
Let’s hope cooler heads carried on wings of due process prevail.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.
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