Walker and Ingraham, who had clerked for Justice Thomas on the Supreme Court, noted that his name had already come up in the coverage of the allegations against Kavanaugh. After the New Yorker story was published, Thomas’s accuser, Anita Hill, called for a “fair and neutral process.”16 Memories of Thomas’s contentious confirmation battle shaped many people’s reactions to the allegations against Kavanaugh.
Clarence Thomas was nominated on July 1, 1991, by President George H. W. Bush to fill the seat vacated by Thurgood Marshall, one of the Court’s most prominent liberals. Because the appointment promised to shift the ideological balance of the Court, liberal activists prepared a reprise of the campaign that had prevented Robert Bork’s confirmation four years earlier. The Judiciary Committee hearings in September were brutal and prolonged. Thomas testified for more than twenty-four hours over five days, longer than any Supreme Court nominee to that point save Bork himself. The committee’s vote on his nomination was seven to seven, all Republicans and one Democrat voting in his favor. The nomination was sent to the full Senate for consideration on September 27.
Two days before his expected confirmation, Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio and Timothy Phelps of Newsday both disclosed allegations of sexual harassment against Thomas by a young law professor named Anita Hill, who had worked under him at two federal agencies. The accusation had been leaked from the FBI’s background investigation, probably by a Democratic staff member.17 (In fact, the confidential closed-door session with senators that Feinstein intentionally sidestepped was instituted in 1992 by then-chairman Joe Biden in response to the debacle, in which Thomas’s reputation was damaged by an unsupported allegation.) The confirmation vote was suspended, and the hearings were reopened. From October 11 through 13, the nation’s attention was riveted on the dramatic, often wrenching, testimony of the nominee and his accuser.18 Thomas was confirmed by a vote of fifty-two to forty-eight, the closest for a Supreme Court appointment since the nineteenth century. Opinion polls found that the American public, by a two-to-one margin, had not found Hill’s allegations credible. The balance of opinion was similar among both men and women and among both blacks and whites.
Early Sunday morning, Emma Brown of the Washington Post left a voicemail for Kavanaugh. She was about to publish a lengthy story that would detail an allegation of sexual assault against him. This was the first time Kavanaugh heard the name of his accuser: Christine Blasey Ford.
He was shocked to hear his name used in the same sentence as the term “sexual assault,” and when he heard the woman’s name, he realized that her accusation was not about something misinterpreted on a date. He did not remember who she was or what high school she had attended, so he called a high school friend to ask if the accuser’s name rang a bell. Kavanaugh went to Georgetown Preparatory School, an all-boys school in North Bethesda, Maryland, and he and his schoolmates had socialized with students from several other single-sex schools in the Washington area. His friend remembered Blasey, who had attended the all-girls Holton-Arms School, also in Bethesda, and immediately shared some of his unfavorable impressions of her from her high school days.
Kavanaugh went downstairs to tell Ashley about the phone call from the reporter. It was possible that he had met his accuser when they were in high school, he said, but he never went out with her and had never been in an intimate situation with her. It went without saying that he had never attempted to rape her. Ashley responded calmly and expressed her support. Believing that everything happens for a reason, she assured him that they’d get through it.
Kavanaugh also called McGahn and Shah to tell them about the Post story. Shah, who was in Connecticut, where his mother was recovering from a brain aneurysm, spoke with Emma Brown from the hospital. She shared a few details, such as the names of Ford and others she said were present at the incident.
Brown had been working on the story with Ford since early July, when Kavanaugh’s name was still on the short list of potential nominees.19 Just a few hours after Brown’s call to Kavanaugh, the story was published. It was explosive.
The angle chosen by the reporter was that Ford did not want to go public, but that the Intercept and New Yorker stories had exposed her allegation without her consent. Amid the intense speculation about the identity of Kavanaugh’s accuser, she preferred to tell the story herself.
That story was a remarkable combination of vagueness and specificity:
[O]ne summer in the early 1980s, Kavanaugh and a friend—both “stumbling drunk,” Ford alleges—corralled her into a bedroom during a gathering of teenagers at a house in Montgomery County. While his friend watched, she said, Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed on her back and groped her over her clothes, grinding his body against hers and clumsily attempting to pull off her one-piece bathing suit and the clothing she wore over it. When she tried to scream, she said, he put his hand over her mouth. “I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” said Ford, now a 51-year-old research psychologist in northern California. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.”20
She said she had not told anyone about the incident until 2012, during couples therapy with her husband. She provided excerpts from what she said were her therapist’s notes, which recorded that four boys at an “elitist boys’ school” attacked her. The discrepancy in the number of boys involved was the fault of her therapist, she said.
Brown described Ford, “a registered Democrat who has made small contributions to political organizations,” as “a professor at Palo Alto University who teaches in a consortium with Stanford University, training graduate students in clinical psychology. Her work has been widely published in academic journals.” The article included but downplayed evidence that contradicted Ford’s insistence that she wanted to keep quiet, noting for example that Ford had “engaged Debra Katz” more than a month previously and that she had taken a polygraph test in early August to buttress her credibility.
Ford’s memory was foggy, Brown reported. She thought the incident might have happened in 1982. She wasn’t sure whose house they were in, how she got there, or where exactly it was. She had drunk only one beer, she said, but Kavanaugh and his friend, Mark Judge, were heavily intoxicated. Brown mentioned that Kavanaugh’s yearbooks made references to drinking and that Judge was public about his own heavy drinking in high school.
Ford managed to flee from the house where she was assaulted, Brown reported, but she wasn’t sure how she got home. The attack deeply affected her for the next four to five years and later induced anxiety and post-traumatic stress. The story could not have been more sympathetic to Ford.
The worst part of the day for Kavanaugh was calling his mother. He knew she would be devastated. The hearings and follow-up questions had been abusive, but a public accusation of sexual assault showed how much worse it could get.
McGahn reassured Kavanaugh, reminding him that they had always known something like this might happen. Was it a case of something “going south” with someone he’d dated? Kavanaugh flatly denied he had ever sexually assaulted anyone, much less this woman, whom he didn’t even remember meeting. McGahn had already talked to President Trump, who showed no interest in abandoning Kavanaugh. That show of support was an important first step, but in the wake of the Post story, it would be difficult to convince others.