CANADA
The Globe and Mail
September 27, 2018
By Elizabeth Renzetti
Women made time Thursday to gather around television sets and laptops to watch Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony to the U.S. Senate judiciary committee. Judging by the outpouring on social media, some of them were in tears. Some were enraged. Far too many of them understood, in the heart and the brain and the gut, what Prof. Blasey Ford meant when she said, “Brett’s assault on me drastically altered my life.”
Brett is of course Brett Kavanaugh, U.S. President Donald Trump’s choice for Supreme Court justice, who has been accused of sexual misconduct by two other women in addition to Prof. Blasey Ford. (Justice Kavanaugh denies the allegations.) The consequences of that day, at a drunken impromptu party in suburban Washington more than three decades ago, were evident in Prof. Blasey Ford’s shaking voice. She remembered that Mr. Kavanaugh pushed her into a room and locked the door and got on top of her and tried to remove her clothes and covered her mouth with his hand to stifle her screams. She remembered that he and his friend, also in the room, laughed uproariously. It was her most indelible memory, she told the committee: They were “having fun at my expense.”
Prof. Blasey Ford was too ashamed and afraid to tell anyone initially what had happened. Her schoolwork suffered, she testified. She had trouble making friends. The legacy of that day followed her into adulthood: When she renovated her house a few years ago, she insisted that two front doors be installed, a suggestion that at first mystified her husband, but is abundantly clear from the point of view of someone who is always looking for a way of escape.
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