CHAPTER EIGHT
Fear of Flying
After all the delaying tactics, Senate staffers still weren’t entirely sure that Ford was going to show up for the hearing on Thursday, September 27. Many assumed that she would be a no-show or that some new allegation would derail the proceedings again.
Grassley had assured Ford’s attorneys that he would do everything in his power to “provide a safe, comfortable, and dignified forum.” The hearing would be held in the Dirksen building, with its smaller committee room. The large size of the room in Hart had contributed to the “circus atmosphere” of the first set of hearings.
Grassley’s staff tried to accommodate the requests of Ford’s legal and public relations teams, acquiescing to the request for breaks during her testimony, allowing only one video camera at the hearing, excluding Kavanaugh from the room during her testimony, and providing security. They declined her demands that Kavanaugh testify first, that Mark Judge be subpoenaed, and that only senators ask questions.
There were no female Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee, and the Republicans worried that the spectacle of Ford facing an all-male bank of GOP senators would be a public relations nightmare. The media would interpret questions that were in any way pointed as further harassment of a victim of a brutal sexual assault.
The Republicans on the committee therefore pushed to hire a female attorney with expertise in such sensitive questioning. They did not need a hearing that scored political points but one that elicited facts to shore up the confidence of Republican senators. It wasn’t that they could not trust the senators to ask appropriate questions so much as that they knew the media would spin whatever happened as badgering of Ford, as they had done in Justice Thomas’s hearing.
After interviewing candidates on the previous Saturday, before the hearing date was even set, they selected Rachel Mitchell, a respected sex crimes prosecutor from Maricopa County, Arizona. With her long and distinguished background working with victims, even teaching courses in how to interview victims compassionately to get to the truth, she was the perfect choice. She was a government attorney, so she had no law partners who had to approve her appearance. For political reasons, several attorneys had already been forbidden by their firms to participate. And it didn’t hurt that Mitchell was from Senator Flake’s state, since he was known to be uneasy about how to balance concern for Ford and fairness to Kavanaugh. When the committee staff interviewed Mitchell, they told her that a previous interviewee had described herself as a bulldog. She laughed and told them if that was what they wanted, she was not the right person. She had built up a career of dealing with sex crime victims and would be returning to that job. She had to be true to herself.
Despite their previous outrage that male senators might ask Ford questions, Democrats and the media were outraged by the plan. “Handing off the questioning of Dr. Blasey to female staff members would be a gross departure from Senate practice and based on the risible idea that the questioning of sexual assault survivors is ‘women’s work,’ ” declared Lara Bazelon in a New York Times op-ed titled “A Sexist, Cowardly Ploy.”1 In fact, the Senate had hired outside counsel for important hearings on a number of occasions, including for the Watergate and Whitewater investigations.2
Before the hearing began at ten o’clock, a half-dozen photographers sat in the well between the senators and the witness table. At an ordinary hearing, dozens of photographers might crowd into the well, approaching the witness table and moving around for better angles. Today the small group had been instructed to keep their backs against the dais, as far away as possible from Ford.
PR for Ford was handled by Kendra Barkoff Lamy, who had been Joe Biden’s spokesman when he was vice president. She had moved on to the Democratic powerhouse public relations firm SKDKnickerbocker—the same firm used by the Sixteen Thirty Fund. The dark-money group had paid SKDK $7 million in 2017.
Ford’s team tried to stipulate which media outlets could cover the hearings, including Getty, Bloomberg, and the Associated Press. Grassley’s staff had to explain that media passes were handled by the Senate press galleries, the nonpartisan liaisons between the Senate and the press. The most Grassley’s office could do was say how many press positions were allotted. Photographers went in the well, and there were daily, periodical, and radio-television galleries, which had forty-eight seats among them. C-SPAN was the only television outlet, and there were far fewer reporters than the two hundred who had covered the first set of hearings.
The Judiciary Committee closed the hallway outside the hearing room. For the first set of hearings, there had been three stakeout positions for cameras and microphones. There was no press stakeout for the reopened hearings. In fact, the whole floor was closed when the witnesses were moving through the building. One of the accommodations for Ford was that she and Kavanaugh would never cross paths. When not testifying, Ford would wait in the Democratic offices on the second floor of Dirksen. Kavanaugh would wait in an office around the corner. After the hallway was cleared, she would be brought in, and when she had finished, the hallway would be cleared again so that she could be sent back to the Democrats’ holding room.
There were only six seats for the public, controlled by Grassley and Feinstein. Since a guest’s disruptive behavior would reflect poorly on the sponsoring senator, protests were unlikely. Republicans had tolerated the protests in the first set of hearings because they made Democrats look unhinged. This hearing would be different.
Anticipation for Ford’s appearance was high. Despite all the media interest in her story, pictures of her had been thoroughly scrubbed from the internet with the exception of one blurry surfing photo in which she was wearing sunglasses. Her story had been developed and carefully edited by friendly reporters. Tens of millions of Americans were watching as she walked in and took her seat, followed by her attorneys Bromwich and Katz. Viewers saw a middle-aged woman in a navy blue blazer gazing out from behind large glasses, her blonde hair freshly blow-dried and styled. She was accompanied by many attorneys, but her immediate and extended family were noticeably absent. Some of her friends sat in the front row.
The room was more intimate than it appeared on television, giving the audience the sense of observing a private conversation rather than a hearing. Though emotions ran high, everyone was respectful. They shared cell phone chargers, and the actress Alyssa Milano handed out tissues to everyone around her before the hearing started.
Grassley, who had stopped by Ford’s waiting room moments earlier to assure her he didn’t have horns, opened the hearing with his trademark expression of concern for witnesses, apologizing to both Ford and Kavanaugh for the “vile threats” they and their families had been subjected to during the weeks leading to the hearing.3 He reminded the audience that the last-minute revelation of a serious allegation that had been received months earlier had derailed the process. It was a sticking point for Republicans on the committee, who were appalled at how the allegations had been handled. Grassley noted that the letter had been kept “secret from July 30 . . . until September 13,” preventing the committee from investigating privately, which would have allowed senators to weigh the charges while maintaining the confidentiality that Ford said she desired.