Ford had never mentioned Kavanaugh before 2012, when his name was widely reported as a potential Supreme Court nominee, Mitchell noted. Ford had also described the attacks in varying ways when speaking to her husband, according to news reports. She told him before they were married that she had suffered a sexual assault, but after they were married she told him she had been a victim of “physical abuse.” Both comments referred to the same incident she described with Kavanaugh, she testified. But she never explained why she would have downgraded her description of an attempted rape to physical assault.
Ford also had no memory of details that could corroborate her account, such as who invited her to the party, how she got there, whose house it took place in, or how she got from the party back to her house, a distance that would have taken twenty minutes by car but would have required a nearly three-hour walk in the dark if she did not have a ride. “Given that this all took place before cell phones, arranging a ride home would not have been easy,” Mitchell noted. The difficulty of finding such a ride would have likely made it a salient part of the evening in and of itself.
Ford’s account had never been corroborated by anyone, including her lifelong friend and supporter Leland Keyser. All alleged eyewitnesses denied having any memory of the event.
Ford had also not offered a consistent account of the alleged assault, Mitchell wrote, offering conflicting information about whether she could hear conversations taking place elsewhere at the party.
Ford’s account of who was at the party had also varied. According to her therapist’s notes, four boys were in the bedroom in which she was assaulted—an error, according to the Washington Post, as there were four boys at the party but only two in the room where the assault happened. In her letter to Senator Feinstein, Ford described the party as including “me and 4 others.” Her polygraph statement said four boys and two girls were at the party. In her opening testimony, Ford said that four boys and her female friend Leland Ingham Keyser were at the party, but in response to Mitchell’s questions, she said that Leland was one of the four others at the party and she remembered no others. In her statement to the polygrapher and in a text to the Post, she asserted that Patrick “P. J.” Smyth was a “bystander,” but in her testimony she said that was inaccurate.
She also had trouble remembering recent events presumably unaffected by the trauma of an assault or the vagaries of time, such as whether she had showed a reporter her therapist’s notes and whether her polygraph session had been recorded. She refused to provide the therapist’s notes to the committee despite relying on them for “corroboration.” She said she had wanted her story to remain confidential, but the “first person other than her therapist or husband to whom she disclosed the identity of her alleged attacker” was a person operating a tip line at the Washington Post. The college professor said she did not know how to contact a U.S. senator, but she did know how to contact her U.S. representative.
Ford could not remember if her polygraph had been conducted the day of or the day after her grandmother’s funeral, an event that should have been significant to her. Regardless, it would have been inappropriate to administer a polygraph to someone in grief.
Ford’s frequent flying was at odds with the assertion that she was afraid to fly, Mitchell noted. It was also noteworthy that her attorneys had apparently not told her about offers for a private hearing in California, a breach of duty to their client that Senator Cornyn suggested warranted a referral to their local bar ethics committee.23
The measured report from Mitchell, based on facts, was completely different from the media coverage, which was focused on emotion. Mitchell’s findings were ignored by many media outlets or seriously downplayed. The findings were buried in the final two paragraphs of a New York Times story about the FBI investigation.24
A supposed “fact check” by the New York Times cited no factual errors but pushed activists’ assertions that Kavanaugh had been “misleading” and that his statements were “disputed” or “required context.”25 The article was self-refuting. For instance, it reported that he denied drinking to excess immediately before quoting him as saying, “Sometimes I had too many beers.”
At the same time, few media outlets were investigating Kavanaugh’s accusers. For example, Ford said that she had not told her husband the details of the assault until 2012. The occasion for her doing so, she said, was serious marital conflict arising out of her desire for a second front door on their $2.5 million house in Palo Alto, California—an escape hatch, as it were, for a woman traumatized by sexual assault. This odd story did not hold up under scrutiny. According to one of the only reporters to investigate, building permits for renovations on the home—which included an extra room and extra door—were completed by 2010. The door was not an escape route but an additional entrance. Ford said in her testimony she “hosted” Google interns in the additional space. And curiously, the woman who sold the house to the Fords in 2007, a marriage therapist, reportedly had continued to work out of the home, using the extra room, with its own door, for her practice.26 A web profile says she deals with “relationship issues” and “disturbing memories from the past.”27
The media continued to ignore community chatter, especially regarding the notable absence of Ford’s family from the ranks of her public supporters. Neighbors, friends, and country club members got the distinct impression that while Ford’s family supported her, they were relieved that her uncorroborated story hadn’t destroyed Kavanaugh.
Things were going even worse for Julie Swetnick. NBC’s Kate Snow recorded an interview with her on Sunday, to be broadcast the following day.28 The delay was reportedly to allow the network to verify her statements and decide what to air, although NBC ultimately aired the interview despite not being able “to independently verify her claims.” The network acknowledged that “there are things that she told us on camera that differ from her written statement last week,” and that she was even “unclear about when she first decided to come forward.” Since the publication of her sworn allegation that Kavanaugh was part of a long-running gang-rape cartel, Swetnick’s credibility had been in doubt. Ex-boyfriends alerted authorities to her character problems; it was revealed that a former employer had fired her over falsified job history and her own sexual impropriety on the job; and curious ties to Debra Katz’s firm began popping up.
The interview, conducted under soft lighting, began with Swetnick’s describing herself as “shy” and “private,” “not somebody who follows the news,” “not political at all.” Her allegation against Kavanaugh bore resemblances to the others. He was a mean and sloppy drunk. He tried to “shift girls’ clothing,” as Ford had previously alleged. Like Ford, she cited four witnesses, none of whom was able to corroborate her account.
Swetnick’s story, like Ford’s, had changed, although Swetnick called her own earlier sworn declaration into question. She had earlier sworn that Kavanaugh and Judge were spiking the punch, but now told Snow that they were simply handing out cups and were near the punch. She had written under oath that she saw Kavanaugh and Judge waiting in line for their turn to rape a drugged girl. She now told Snow that she could be sure only that they were standing not in lines but in groups of boys outside rooms like the one she later was raped in, adding that “it’s just too coincidental.” She had previously sworn that Kavanaugh and Judge were present at her rape. She now told Snow only that she had seen them earlier at the same party, and she echoed Ford’s most salient memory: “I could hear them laughing and laughing.” She also called into question her own timeline of the events. In her affidavit, Swetnick stated that she had attended the parties from 1981 to 1983. Yet she told Snow that she stopped attending after being raped at one of the parties at age nineteen. She turned twenty in 1982, so if her NBC interview is to be believed, her earlier date range was incorrect. Swetnick also said that Kavanaugh and his classmates wore their school uniforms to the parties because “they were very proud” of Georgetown Prep. But that school had only a dress code, not a uniform, and the boys couldn’t wait to get out of their required jackets and ties.